


Aftermath

by Coffee_Flavored_Kisses



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Death, Feels, First Kiss, Fluff, Homosexuality, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Mary is dead, Mary is not Moran, Parentlock, Smut, Widow, not in this one, single parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:00:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 29,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coffee_Flavored_Kisses/pseuds/Coffee_Flavored_Kisses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary Morstan Watson is dead, and John Watson has been left alone and devastated with a daughter. Forced back into the familiar surroundings of Baker Street, John deals with grief and guilt along with parenting, and Sherlock Holmes does whatever he must to carry out his last vow, even after Mary is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“What do I do now?”  
“I don’t know.”

…

Mary had been gone for only an hour. Official records said she was caught in crossfire between rival gangs. But Sherlock Holmes and John Watson knew the truth. She had taken a bullet to save her husband and his best friend.  
Moran was still out there somewhere, but he was no longer after them. He had come for Mary and Mary only, and when she was gone, so was he. Sherlock estimated he might be as far as South America at this point.  
John sat in the laboratory with Sherlock, both of them seated on the floor with their backs to the wall. The glamour of married life had long since worn itself out on John, and Mary’s charm had left even before that. He hadn’t been able to trust her for some time, but he had stayed with her because, after all, they had a child together.  
“It’s over now,” John said finally. They must have been sitting there for nearly an hour after John had identified Mary’s body down in the morgue. Sherlock had wanted him to speak – to say anything at all. But he never said a word. In this instance, even Sherlock knew that he needed to remain silent.  
“What do I do now?”  
“I don’t know.” And he didn’t. The most brilliant man John had ever known, and he didn’t know what to do.  
“Sherlock, she’s gone. I mean, it’s finally hitting me…” his words fell short. His eyes began to tear, and he leaned over until his weight fell against his friend. “Oh god… she’s really gone!”  
Sherlock felt John’s body shake beside his own. He reached beside him, feeling he could now safely share in John’s grief, and held him closely to his side.  
“I’m so sorry, John.”  
Suddenly, the doctor sprang to his feet. He paced for a moment, breathing deeply. His steps were harsh and deliberate on the tile, and Sherlock rose to his feet as well until John stopped.  
“What about Victoria? What am I supposed to do about her?”  
Victoria.  
The Watson’s baby was barely eight weeks old. She was dependent in every way, not even able to hold up her head on her own. She’d been on Mary’s hip, literally, since the day she was born.  
“Mary was breastfeeding. Even now, Mrs. Hudson is warming up bottles of breast milk. What do I do? I’ll need to buy formula, I guess. Oh god, Mary wouldn’t be happy about that at all… I’ll have to hire a nanny, I suppose, for when I go back to work. Will I go back to work? She can’t be without both of her parents for that long! Oh, god, I barely know how to change her diapers! How am I going to do this!”  
Sherlock wanted to offer to help, but how would he be accepted?   
“It will all work out,” he offered. “One way or another, John, it will all work out.”  
“Sherlock,” John responded, almost angrily, but taking deep breaths immediately after. “Please don’t tell me that it will be alright. You don’t know that.”  
“You’re a wonderful father, John. You’ll--”  
“Stop! Just… stop. You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”  
Once again, Sherlock fell silent. And once again, John began to pace. His steps were slower this time, almost careless. He started to stagger. He leaned against a table…  
All at once he had reached out, swiping beakers and test tubes from the surface, throwing them to the floor with an ear-splitting crash. Even Sherlock startled, and he couldn’t react. He felt frozen in place and completely hopeless. He had imagined John’s reaction from the moment Mary took her last breath, but he never expected this.  
John moved from table to table, clearing everything in sight. He was usually so calm, but now it was like he was releasing a lifetime of pain and angst on everything in sight.  
When he started flipping over microscopes and some of the more expensive equipment, Sherlock had to step in.  
“John…” he reached to his friend and gripped his shoulders mid-tantrum. He pulled John close to him and looked him in the eye. “I know this is hard for you – the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But you must focus! Focus, John!”  
John fell into Sherlock’s arms, his legs unable to bear his weight any longer, and Sherlock just held him. John’s arms made their way around Sherlock’s waist, and he buried his face inside Sherlock’s coat. Sherlock only realized John was crying again when he felt the tears seeping through his shirt.  
Neither of them would mention this moment ever again.  
…  
“Sherlock, John, I’m so sorry. I’ve just heard,” Mrs. Hudson greeted her boys at the door and hugged each of them closely.   
“I’m going upstairs,” John answered coldly as he left them.  
Sherlock watched his friend’s ascent before turning back to his landlady. “Where is she?”  
“Sleeping soundly in the bedroom,” she answered. “Perfect angel, she is. She can stay a bit longer if that’s what you need.”  
“I’m sure John will get her when she wakes up. He just needs some time alone.”  
“Oh, I can certainly understand,” she answered. “Though I’m out of bottles. When little Victoria wakes up, I’ll need to give her something, won’t I?”  
“I – I’ll work something out,” he answered. Though what or how, he wasn’t sure.  
He ran up the stairs and found John in his chair, leant back and still wearing his heavy coat even though the room was already quite warm. He sat across from John silently for a moment. Again, John was the first to speak.  
“I’ll have to plan a funeral,” he said. “I’ll have to call the family and tell them. And I’ll have to pick out a coffin and flowers and I’ll have to buy a black suit.”  
“John, I’m so sorry. Again, I wish I knew what to say, but words fail me. And if there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.”  
“I’ll have to go back home and pack my things. I can’t stay there.”  
“John, Victoria needs formula.”  
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.  
“I would get some right now, only I’m not sure what to get. As her father and a doctor, you would know better than I, wouldn’t you?”  
“I suppose I’ll be expected to write her obituary as well.”  
“John…”  
“I don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much to do.”  
“John, are you listening?”  
“Of course I’m listening!” he snapped. “What do you want me to do about it?”  
“I need you to tell me what to get.”  
“You’re the genius! Figure it out for your own damn self!”  
…  
He tried.  
He had been at the supermarket staring at formula containers for the better part of an hour now. How is there an entire aisle devoted to one food for infants? How are there so many brands and variations? Soy? Milk-based? Iron added? Organic? What was the difference?  
Of course, he knew the difference, but how could he know which was best for a newborn?  
He reached for his phone, considering that perhaps after a little time, John would talk to him about it. He dialed, but there was no answer. He should have expected as much.

_Soy-based or milk-based? – SH_

He wasn’t surprised when there was no answer to the text. Unsure and well aware that time was rapidly running out, he grabbed one of every kind.  
Bottles.  
Auto-stop. No-drip. Rounded. Cylinder. “Just Like Mum’s!” Whatever that meant. What kind of hell was this?  
Again, he grabbed one of every kind.  
He did the same with the pacifiers, the nappies, and some infant onesies just in case little Tori had soiled hers faster than Mrs. Hudson could run them through the wash. He was sure he had forgotten something, but at least he had gotten the immediate essentials.  
Even if it did cost him nearly five hundred quid, he was glad just to have been on the safe side.  
…  
“Oh thank God!” Mrs. Hudson held the screaming baby in her arms, but was gloriously happy to see Sherlock had returned. “Oh, my… how many did you get?”  
“I wasn’t certain which was best,” he answered. He failed to mention he had asked John, but had not received a response.  
“Oh I’ve never had to make this sort of choice,” she mumbled. “Let’s start with this one, I guess. Here. You take the baby.” She handed the child over to a very resistant Sherlock, then grabbed one of the containers and bottles and left for the kitchen.  
“Oh…” he murmured. “Well, alright. There, there. Now, let’s not cry about it, alright? Well, it’s not all that bad, is it? I know, I know. Me too. I feel the same, Victoria.”   
He wasn’t sure talking to a crying baby would be of any use, but he certainly wasn’t the singing type. He realized in that moment that he’d never held this baby – or any baby, for that matter – and that it was quite terrifying.   
But more terrifying than simply holding her was the moment her eyes opened, and she looked right at him. Babies always make eye contact, and it is somewhat unsettling when they do. Her cries slowed to mere coos, her eyes widened to show how big and blue and just like her mother’s they were, and one of her hands, tiny and frail, met his little finger and wrapped around it with a vice grip that left Sherlock absolutely speechless.  
“Well you’ve managed to do the impossible, haven’t you?” Mrs. Hudson smiled in relief as she approached.   
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he answered. “Not just yet, anyway. Er… here.” He reached out his arms full of baby for Mrs. Hudson to accept, which she did. But once Victoria was swaddled in the woman’s arms, she began crying and squirming as before.  
“Perhaps you’d better take her back,” Mrs. Hudson suggested. Well, she didn’t suggest it as much as she insisted, and handed Victoria back before Sherlock could dare object.  
He cradled the child and urged the bottle to her lips. To the delight of both Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson, she immediately accepted.  
“You should sit down to feed her,” she suggested. “You’ll be more comfortable.”  
“I think I’ll take her upstairs,” he said. “Might do John some good to see her.”  
“I think you’re right,” she smiled. “Poor thing. Let me know if you need anything.”  
“I will.”  
“Oh, but please don’t need anything for a while. I’m not as young as I once was, and I need a break.”  
Holding a baby, as frightening as it may have seemed at first, was quickly growing on him, but walking upstairs was still a bit scary. He took the steps carefully, one at a time unlike the usual way, and once he’d reached the top, made his way to his chair.  
John hadn’t moved.  
“She’s a well-tempered child, at least,” Sherlock remarked.  
John was silent, staring into the fireplace.  
“She’s taking the formula. I think it’s the milk one. With iron. Can’t be sure. I’ll need to check and see which one Mrs. Hudson used.”  
John let out a sigh, but was otherwise silent.  
“Would you like to hold her?”  
“I’m sorry,” John whispered. “I can’t.” He rose from his seat, and Sherlock watched as he moved to his bedroom.  
“I apologize for your father’s behavior,” Sherlock told Victoria. “He’s upset right now. Can’t blame him, actually. I’m afraid your father has had a rather difficult day. You have, too, you know. Though you don’t know it yet. It must be wonderful to be so young. To be oblivious to the evils of this world, and not to know when something or someone you love has left your life forever. I never thought I’d be envious of an infant, but here we are. Isn’t it silly? Look at me. I’m talking to you as though you can reply. I imagine I might be experiencing a bit of grief myself. I did love your mother very much, even though she was a bit selfish at times. But I suppose she was selfish for the right reasons. You will only ever hear good from my lips when it comes to matters concerning your mother. She made your father happy for a long time and comforted him during some of the most difficult days of his life, and for that I shall forever be indebted to her. And I do sincerely hope that you will be like your mother in many ways, Tori. Do you mind being called Tori? I suppose I should call you by your proper name, as you may, in fact, prefer to be called Victoria. Some people prefer a shortened name, while others do not care for it. When you do decide to start talking, I would appreciate it if you would let me know.”  
Her eyes, which hadn’t stopped looking at him this entire time, began to close.   
“Well I suppose if you are going to sleep, maybe I will join you if you don’t mind terribly. Sweet dreams, Baby Watson.”  
He promised himself he’d only close his eyes for a moment.  
…  
“Sherlock.”  
He opened his eyes to see John standing in front of him in his dressing gown, obviously fresh from the shower, apparently having had a good cry in there as well.  
“John, sorry. I--”  
“It’s alright,” he answered. “I just thought I’d tell you to put the baby down before you go to sleep for good. You two have been like this for an hour now, and I don’t want you to be careless with her.”  
“Well then why don’t you take her? Mrs. Hudson has the cradle in her room--”  
“No,” he answered quickly. “I can’t. Please do it yourself.”  
“But, John, don’t you at least want to kiss her goodnight or whatever it is that normal parents do?”  
“Am I a normal parent? Did I ever have a chance at being a normal parent? Or a normal anything?”  
“John…”  
“No, Sherlock. I’m going to bed. Please, just…” he turned to walk back to his bedroom. “Figure it out.”  
Sherlock brought the baby back down to Mrs. Hudson’s, and she held her while he brought the cradle upstairs. He considered setting it in the living room, but he worried her midnight cries might wake the neighbors. He knew asking John to keep her upstairs with him would be of no use, so he set the cradle beside his bed, put Victoria down, and crept under his covers.  
She woke up three times throughout the night, and Sherlock didn’t sleep at all. He tried, but he couldn’t help but stare down at the little body wrapped in the pink blanket her mother had made. Every time she stirred, he picked her up. Every time she lay still for more than ten minutes, he checked to make sure she was still breathing.  
He had already lost one Watson that day. He couldn’t let his negligence cause any more harm to that family.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John plans a funeral, and Sherlock feels compelled to help.

Mrs. Hudson had noticed Sherlock pacing in his bedroom when she brought up the morning tea. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, but when she noticed he was holding Victoria, she couldn’t help but approach him.  
“Psst!”  
He looked over to her as she stood in the doorway. “Ah, you’re here,” he said plainly. “Where is it?”  
“Next to your chair, of course,” she smiled. “My god, did you sleep at all?”  
He barely caught her eye as he casually mumbled that he hadn’t. “There were more pressing matters to attend to,” he said.  
“And how’s John? Have you seen him?”  
“I heard him walking around up there about an hour ago, but he hasn’t come down.”  
“Well I suppose we all grieve in different manners. I remember when my dear mother passed, God rest her soul. I wouldn’t eat or sleep for more than three days. And as far as getting dressed – forget it!”  
“Yes… erm… thank you for that image. Would you mind?” He handed the infant over, and she accepted with a smile.  
“I’ll take her downstairs for a bit and give you some peace. Perhaps you’d like to rest up a bit, too.”  
“Yes, thank you.”  
She left with the baby, and Sherlock fell asleep before the minute hand had even had the chance to move.  
…  
“Sherlock?”  
The detective woke, quickly rubbed his eyes, and turned toward the man who stood beside his bed. “John? What time is it?”  
“Almost noon. Where’s the baby?”  
“Downstairs. Maybe you’d like to visit?”  
He swayed a little with his hands in his pockets. “Actually I’m going to make some arrangements for the, uh… well…”  
“Oh, right. If you need anything, I--”  
“No, I’m alright. I may be gone late. Probably stop by the old place and grab some things.”  
“Victoria needs her things, too. I know that might be a bit much to handle on your own, so if--”  
“I said I will handle it, Sherlock.” He waited until he could see Sherlock absorbing his words, and then left with a nod. “See you later.”  
Sherlock was too bothered by John’s manner to resume his sleep.  
…  
“Something’s off with him.”  
“How was she?” Sherlock asked, dismissing Mrs. Hudson’s remark.  
“Sleeping again. I’m afraid babies do little else.”  
“I might just pop out for a while,” he told her. “You don’t mind, do you?”  
“Oh, I understand,” she smiled. “I’ll keep an eye on the wee one. Will you be gone long?”  
“Hard to say,” he answered, wrapping his scarf around his neck. “I have a few errands to run.”  
“Errands?” she chuckled. “Oh, right. Following Johnny around town again, I see? Oh, it’s alright. You haven’t done that in a while. I suppose he’s had Mary to keep an eye on him…” Her last three words faded gradually into a whisper. “Oh. Might be a bit soon to be bringing that name up again.”  
“I’ll be sure to return at a healthy hour,” he assured her.  
“Be careful, dear,” she called to him. “And don’t be too hard on him. He’s just been through a great deal, and it’s only natural that he might want to be alone.”  
…  
Sherlock had figured out which church John would choose for the services by the time he had flagged down a cab.  
He wouldn’t choose anywhere that held any sentiment to him or his family, nor would he choose a place too far for family and friends to attend. It would have to be a church that participated in Mary’s chosen denomination, or at least one that would comply with a service of that type being held within its walls. Mary was always fond of modern architecture, a fact John spoke of often enough to indicate how important it was, so it would be a newer church, or one that had been newly remodeled. All churches with “St. Mary” in the title were out, of course. That left one – St. Augustus.  
As he concluded, John’s car was parked outside, and Sherlock stood afar off behind an old fencepost waiting for a sign of his friend. Within minutes, John emerged with papers in hand and a minister on his side, with whom he chatted for a moment, shook hands, and parted ways. Finally John unlocked the door of his car, and Sherlock would have been able to remain unseen if it hadn’t been for the three whiney Chihuahuas who immediately began barking when they saw the detective lurking nearby.  
“Sherlock?” John called from across the street. “Is that you?”  
“Hello, John,” Sherlock said, peering back at the curs in disgust. “I do understand how this looks--”  
“It looks like you followed me here,” John said. “No other way it _could_ look. My only question is, why?”  
“You are going through something difficult, John. According to every unwritten rule of friendship, I should ‘be here for you,’ as they say.”  
“Sherlock, I’m fine. I’ll be fine, anyway. I think the most important thing is for me to have time to myself.”  
“I agree.”  
“So I’ll be going to the funeral home now.”  
“Fine.”  
“Sherlock. I mean I’m going. I am. By myself.”  
Sherlock started to understand that John was serious. He wanted to be alone.  
Without anyone.  
Without Sherlock.  
“John, perhaps you’d like to come back for a bit. Hold your daughter.”  
“I will, I will,” he said, turning back. “Not now, though. I just can’t go back now. There’s too much to do.”  
“Let me help!”  
“No!” He shouted back. “Can you just for once in your life leave me alone and mind your own business? I happen to know that none of this concerns you. _I’m_ the grieving widower here, Sherlock, in case you’d forgotten.” He walked away before Sherlock could respond.  
With no other option left, Sherlock returned to Baker street hours before he had expected to.  
…  
“She hasn’t stopped crying for the better part of an hour!”  
Mrs. Hudson’s greeting was unusual, and even someone with no powers of deduction could see that what she was saying was obvious.  
He rushed inside and picked up Victoria immediately, not even bothering to remove his coat and scarf.  
“She’s been changed and fed,” Mrs. Hudson moaned. “I was rocking her for a while, and that seemed to help a bit, but she’s positively impossible!”  
“Come now, Victoria,” he spoke gently at the crying child. “Is this any way to act for Mrs. Hudson? Why, she’s been nothing but kind to you.”  
“Sherlock, you can’t speak to a child like she’s a grown-up.”  
“That’s the only way to speak to them,” he replied, walking the infant up the stairs. “Helps develop their linguistic skills and cognitive abilities.”  
She watched him disappear up the steps, but she could still hear the crying. At least it wasn’t in her flat.  
“Well, now, what’s the matter?” he asked her. “You’ve been cleaned and fed and rocked. What else could you want?”  
Her mother, he supposed.  
He remembered something he had heard once from Mary after she’d returned from a birthing class. Something about carrying the baby close to the bosom and rocking back and forth. He figured it was worth a try…  
…  
“You’re still up?” John asked as he entered the flat. “And she’s… sleeping?”  
“On and off,” he replied. “Would you like to--”  
“I think I’ll retire for the night,” John interrupted. “Thank you for… you know.”  
Sherlock fell speechless watching John continue up the steps. How could he turn away after the kind of day he had? Wouldn’t seeing his baby daughter be a breath of fresh air?  
“John Watson,” he hissed, following behind. “Get down here!”  
“You’ve got your mother tone down perfectly,” John smiled back. “Good job.”  
“John, stop being this way.”  
“What way, Sherlock? Sad? Lonely? Depressed? Acting as though I’ve just lost my wife?”  
As the anger rose in his voice, Sherlock knew to back away. “She’s your child,” he whispered. “Hold her.”  
“Tomorrow,” he answered.  
She began to stir, and Sherlock felt it best to return to what he had been doing for several hours now – holding her close to his stomach, keeping her swaddled tightly, swaying her back and forth slowly, and emitting humming noises under his breath. It worked perfectly, and he was able to rest for several hours with her close by. She woke up twice, but both times only required a change and a feeding. For Sherlock, the complete disregard for schedule was unnerving and would be difficult to get used to. But He would have to, he knew, because John just couldn’t.  
…  
Sherlock had left Victoria with Mrs. Hudson, and had walked up to find John in his bedroom with a blank paper and a pen in his hands.  
“May I?”  
John motioned for Sherlock to enter, and he did, seating himself on the edge of the bed while John sat at the desk, staring at the surface.  
“You’re looking unwell, John. Perhaps you should eat something.”  
John scoffed a bit, glancing over at his friend. “Look how the tables have turned,” he laughed just barely under his breath.  
“Excuse me?” Sherlock watched as the doctor’s face showed mannerisms it hadn’t ever before. At least, not that Sherlock had ever seen.  
“Used to be me trying to get you to eat,” he replied. “Look at us.”  
Sherlock failed to see any humor or irony in the whole situation. “I’m simply concerned for your well-being,” he said.  
“I’m fine,” John told him. “Just, you know, trying to write this…” he looked back at the paper, twirling the pen through his hands. “Just a word to let everyone know she’s passed. And of course, the eulogy.”  
“If there’s anything I can do to help, say the word.”  
John was silent, and his face grew calm. “I don’t think there’s anything.”  
Sherlock sat beside another moment. He considered asking about Victoria, whether John would like to see her this morning. He wondered whether he should ask if John had yet had a chance to bring some of her things back. He pondered all kinds of scenarios in which he might speak in a way that John would respond, but none could be relied upon. With no other option left, he rose to leave.  
“What do I say?”  
Sherlock stopped suddenly and turned to John.  
“What do I say, Sherlock? What do I tell people about her?”  
John couldn’t look up at his friend as he spoke. In fact, he couldn’t look anywhere but at that paper, where he had been looking the entire time.  
“You… want my advice?”  
“I _need_ your advice. I need your help.”  
“But you just said a moment ago--”  
“Sherlock, stop. I don’t know what I’m saying half the time.”  
He sat beside John and joined him in looking down at the paper. “What did you have in mind?”  
John smiled, but not the smile Sherlock liked to see. The smile reminded him of the one John had shown just before tackling him to the ground in anger after Sherlock had revealed his return in the restaurant over a year before, or the one he sported when confronting Mary mere months ago. It was the smile John used to imply that he found it ridiculous how impossible some things can be to express in words.  
“I was thinking I might start with telling everyone that I unknowingly married an assassin, and then proceed to detail every lie she told and every trick she played. Maybe throw in the bit where she shot and nearly killed my best friend. Go from there…”  
Sherlock’s eyes locked on John’s face, while John’s still glared at the empty paper. Sherlock wanted so desperately to tell John that he didn’t need to do this now, that he should come downstairs and hold his child, that focusing his mind on matters not related to Mary’s death and immediate circumstances would play a significant role in the recovery process.  
But he didn’t. He didn’t say a word.  
“Sherlock, I shouldn’t be upset.”  
“It’s a perfectly natural reaction.”  
“It’s ridiculous. She was a liar. She lied to me until the very end. She lied to me even after I forgave her for lying to me!”  
“She was also your wife, John, and the mother of your child. And she was your solace during the end of those two years.”  
John snickered sarcastically. “Those two years,” he echoed. “Is that how we’ll refer to it now?”  
As John finally turned his gaze toward Sherlock, the detective found himself at a loss. Encouragement wasn’t exactly his strong suit, but then, John knew that. Surely, John could not expect sentiment in this moment. John expected Sherlock to be Sherlock, and that is just what he did.  
“Traditional obituaries account date of birth, occupation, surviving family, and funeral details. No more is needed.”  
“Even those details won’t be accurate,” John spoke. “Not really. I have the date of birth she gave me, but we know that’s not true.”  
“Just give the details as you’ve known them. No one needs to know the truth.”  
John jotted down three or four sentences, simple, short, and direct. “Done,” he said. He pulled the other paper over that one. “And now for the eulogy…”  
“John, don’t you think you ought to get out for a while? You know, interact--”  
“If you suggest socializing one more time,” he interrupted, almost too softly, “I’m going to absolutely fucking kill you. Please remember how absurd it is that _you_ are suggesting that _I_ socialize.”  
Sherlock smiled. There’s John Watson.  
For a long time, John stayed silent. He would occasionally lean back in his chair, look at the paper for the fortieth… no… forty-first time, or roll his neck a bit for comfort. All the while, his companion stayed seated at his side, waiting for John to make a decision about what the paper would say – what _he_ would say – and how the tone would ultimately be set at the funeral of the woman that, in the end, he barely even knew.  
“I’m just going to do it,” he proclaimed finally. “I’m going to tell the truth.” He set the pen to the paper and began to write. First, a word, then he finished the sentence. Then he moved on to a paragraph, then two, then before Sherlock realized, he was three pages in.  
“Is this really what you want to do? You’re sure you want everyone to know?”  
“ _Fuck her._ ”  
Even Sherlock was surprised at the doctor’s language. “I would recommend you put this off another day,” he said quietly.  
“No. No, I need to do this now.” He continued to write, write until his hands were red, and until the papers were mostly a mess of black scribbles written in a furious rage. “That’s all I needed from you, Sherlock.”  
Sherlock stood to leave, opened the door, and turned back toward his friend. “You know where to find me if you require me again.”  
…  
Mrs. Hudson could hear a muffled voice talking just above her for the past two hours – since she had handed over Victoria for her evening feeding. At first, she suspected that Sherlock must be talking to John, and hoped that perhaps John was bonding with his daughter finally. The urge to spy on her boys was too great a one to resist, so she crept slowly up the steps, listening intently until she could finally make out exactly what words were being spoken.  
“He crept up the ladder – tippity-toppity, tippity-toppity – until he reached the captain’s deck. In the distance, he could hear the call of the sirens, but he kept true north, just as Blackbeard had directed. He slipped the large, grey patch over his eye, donned the Captain’s hat, and continued until the leather of his boots met the green earth for the very first time. His mouth was tightly closed, silent, and still. But his heart was singing and crying and dancing all at once as he felt the elements. So foreign they were, yet it seemed he had belonged here all his life. _No Man’s Island_ , he thought. And what a beautiful thought that was. The end.”  
She walked the three more steps to Sherlock’s flat. He sat in his chair with Victoria cradled in his arms, both of them obviously exhausted. Mrs. Hudson was especially amused at the fact that they both held the same expression on their faces.  
“What was that you were reading?” She smiled.  
“Mrs. Hudson, I implore you,” he whispered harshly. “Keep your voice down.”  
She smiled, though she was a bit sheepish at having almost awoken the child. “What were you reading?”  
“Wasn’t reading,” he said in a hushed toned. “Reciting.”  
“Pirate story?” she asked.  
He nodded.  
“Why are you wincing so, dear? Is it your back?”  
“This chair, it seems, was not designed for such domesticity as this.”  
“I have the rocking chair downstairs,” she reminded him softly. “Bring it up any old time.”  
“There’s no room in here for another chair,” he said. “And I do hope you have a real purpose in being here.”  
“Of course I do,” she smiled. She stepped towards him and kissed the top of his head, then did the same to the baby. “I came to tell you two how I adore you.”  
He smiled, but only after she’d turned away to return to her own home.  
Sherlock could make out the steps above, and determined that John had finished his eulogy, or as it was in reality, John’s confession on Mary’s behalf. He’d been at it for hours, Sherlock realized, and the way John’s steps seem to fall more delicately than earlier proved that John was satisfied by the words he’d finally written.  
He was walking around the bed. Back to the desk. Back toward the bed. The toilet. The desk. And finally the stairs.  
“Finished?” Sherlock asked.  
“Finished,” John nodded. He stared at his sleeping daughter and smiled.  
And this smile was the one Sherlock had been waiting for. John’s smile. John’s _real_ smile.  
“I’m… sorry,” Sherlock said.  
“For what?”  
“For everything you’ve been through,” he answered. “And for expecting so much from you. I do hope you’ll be sympathetic to the fact that I have little practical experience in this area, and even less in knowing the appropriate sentiments for the occasion.”  
John stepped closer and reached his hand to comb through the few blonde hairs on his baby’s head. “I didn’t ask you to stay with me so that you would tell me what to write. I needed you to stay with me so that I _would_ write. You always push me to do what I think impossible. I thought perhaps having you there would be just the kick in the arse I needed.”  
“Would you like this?” he asked, smiling and gesturing to the baby. “It would like you very much, I happen to know.”  
John stared down at them both for a moment at first. “Good night, Sherlock,” he spoke, turning back to the stairs.  
…  
Sherlock laid the babe in the cradle. In a matter of moments, her eyes began to twitch almost violently. Her lips quivered, and she emitted a series of high-pitched squeals.  
“What in the world could you possibly be dreaming of?” he asked her. “You don’t even have an imagination yet.”  
He felt painfully tired, fell into the bed, laid his head to the pillow, and closed his eyes. And sweet child that she was, she gave him six straight hours of sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose I am playing up the enormous amount of character development we saw in Sherlock in Series 3. Perhaps he wouldn't be quite as hands-on as I've made him, but I like to think of John and Victoria as being the exceptions to the rule. Hopefully you can appreciate that.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John delivers the eulogy at Mary's funeral.

The next few days were just the same. One was a carbon copy of the day before, and of the day before that. But today was different. Today, there was to be a funeral.  
John stood in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom for several minutes. He had narrowed his choice in tie to just three, and finally chose a dark green one. In the end, he assumed, it didn’t matter. Mary was the only person who’d notice something as unimportant as the color of his tie. And Mary was dead, remember? He grabbed the folded paper from his desk and tucked it into his pocket.  
“What I have to say today will surprise you,” he recited to his reflection. He had to pause here and breathe deeply before he continued. “Mary was the love of my life, so please remember that in saying what I am about to say, I am not degrading her or saying anything I hope for you to use as reason to resent her. Quite the opposite! She saved my life on more than one occasion, and after you hear her story, you’ll understand why.”  
He went on for the five minutes he had left until finally he heard Sherlock’s steps outside his bedroom door. He paused, waiting for a knock, but none came. Finally he opened the door.  
“Oh, I, uh…” Sherlock tripped over his words a bit.  
“I’m not sure about this eulogy,” John said, speaking so that Sherlock wouldn’t have to.  
“It’s not too late to change it,” Sherlock answered. “Perhaps if you decide--”  
“No,” he interrupted quietly. “It must be the right thing to say. I wouldn’t have decided to say it at all otherwise. No, I need to tell everyone the truth. Besides, I can’t sit down and write another speech. There isn’t time, and I haven’t the heart. I just want all of this to be over.”  
Sherlock nodded. “You are infinitely wiser than you give yourself credit for.”  
John stood astonished that Sherlock had said such words so personally. But what shocked him further was when Sherlock leaned forward with slightly extended arms and embraced John just barely enough for it to be considered a hug.  
“Sherlock, what are you…”  
“Shut up.”  
John reached and pulled him closer. “Thank you.”  
Sherlock finally stepped back, placing his hands behind his back, and cleared his throat. “Cab’s downstairs. Mrs. Hudson is tending to the baby. Shall we?”  
John nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”  
…  
The turnout for the funeral was more impressive than John had anticipated. He had expected a few cousins, possibly his sister, and some old mates he’d kept in touch with since uni, but no more. Even Mary’s friends were few and far between. But he supposed she must have known more people than their mutual friends, and since many of the faces in the crowd were unfamiliar, perhaps they were acquaintances of hers from before she became Mary Morstan.  
The minister read a bit from Psalms, said a prayer, and then it was John’s time to speak. He reached the pulpit and pulled the paper from his pocket.  
Before he could open it, he looked into the crowd for any familiar faces. There were some, but for the most part, they were strangers. Suddenly, it didn’t seem right to read what he had prepared. Most of the people there probably knew all of it already, and the rest were there simply in support of John.  
But he opened the paper anyway, because going off-script might lead to much more disastrous results. When he looked down at it, he read the first line:  
“Mary Morstan Watson was the greatest woman I have ever had the pleasure to know.”  
He was reading the paper he had put in his pocket, wasn’t he? Then why were the words different? And why was the handwriting so similar to Sherlock’s?  
He looked over at his friend, who sat in the front row and nodded slightly before bowing his head.  
“We are all allowed certain friendships in this all-too-limited life we live,” he continued, slightly uncomfortable reading words that clearly weren’t his own. “For the most part, these friendships are fleeting. Those we deem worthy of our time more often than not only befriend us for their own benefit. Once that benefit runs out, they move on.   
“Mary was not such a person. All her knew her could speak only of her loyalty in the face of adversity, her strong judgment in times of confusion, and her determination in time of difficulty. Though some may have seen her simply as a caretaker, she was in many ways the leader of our family, having guided me through times of indecision and uncertainty. In many ways she was my compass, and in every way she was my savior.   
“There was a time when I found myself quite alone, my last good friend having deserted me to pursue a somewhat selfish endeavor.” John stopped, realizing what he was reading, and knowing that it was Sherlock who had put this into words made him wonder whether he should continue. He had no option but to go on, however, so he resumed. “I had been all alone. My life was filled with the mundane doings of my day-to-day life and the usual dull schedule of the average human being. I had been driven close to insanity, which I manifested externally by making the conscious decision to grow a mustache, which in retrospect was an action that only served to exaggerate my physical imperfections and cause me to don a more mature visage than I should have. It must have easily aged me close to eleven years. I really do not know what I was thinking. I can only plea temporary insanity.  
“But I digress. During this time that caused me to indulge in such unacceptable behavior, I found Mary. Or rather, Mary found me. And for the first time in a long time, I began to feel as though I could truly live again.  
“To find someone who is loyal, unquestioning, and vigilant, who is unmoved even when you begin to question yourself, who pulls you from the dark place to which you retreat in time of trial, is to find the one with whom you must spend every day of the rest of your life. In Mary, I found just that friend. In Mary, I found my redemption.”  
…  
The service trudged on, and then the burial. As the coffin sank into the earth, John stood by like the soldier he was, strong and with his back erect, his eyes straight forward until the last scripture had been read.  
At the end of it all, Sherlock and John took the cab back on the long road home. John sat with his weight on the door, his face staring out the window, and his hands folded in his lap. Sherlock sat beside, silent until John finally spoke.  
“Thank you.”  
“They were your words,” Sherlock said. “You just hadn’t spoken them.”  
“They were _your words_ ,” he corrected. “I felt the same way on most of it, but they were your words.”  
“Which parts did you not feel the same?”  
“You could have left out the bit about the mustache.”  
Sherlock smiled as he caught John’s eye. “It wasn’t anything you didn’t realize after the fact.”  
John nodded. “Don’t rub it in, that’s all.” He paused for a moment, surprised he was able to have a bit of a laugh. “Sherlock, I have to tell you something.”  
Sherlock watched him, listening intently. “Go on.”  
John sat upright. He was obviously searching for words, his eyes fixed on Sherlock’s, and his fingers fiddling together for a moment before he spoke. “I’m so very sorry for the lack of attention I have paid to Tori. And I am sorry that the burden of responsibility has fallen to you.”  
“It is no burden at all.”  
“I’m sorry that I have been so distant in general, too. And that you have had to deal with a baby in addition to all of your usual responsibilities.”  
“Deal with?” Sherlock asked. “John, it has been my genuine pleasure.”  
“Sherlock, you don’t have to say that.”  
“Since when have you ever known me to say anything frivolous? I do have to say it, John, because I need you to know that it is true. She is an absolute joy, and I have thoroughly enjoyed this extra time with her.”  
“You really mean that?”  
“Yes. Or else it is the sleep deprivation talking.”  
John smiled and rested his palm firmly on Sherlock’s leg. “You’ve been the only constant in my life. In my whole life.”  
“I wasn’t always so constant.”  
“You were when it counted.”  
Sherlock smiled. “It is your own strength that has carried you through all you have been subjected to.”  
“Well, then it’s your friendship that has given me that strength. And if I hadn’t had you during all this, I just don’t think I… is that your phone?”  
“Oh, I suppose it is,” he said as he realized there was a buzzing in his pocket. “Mrs. Hudson? Yes, it’s over… We’re on our way… he’s here, with me... Much better… How is Victoria behaving?”  
“Behaving?” John asked with a hint of a laugh. “She’s two months old.”  
“We’ll be there in thirteen minutes, Mrs. Hudson. Surely you can manage until then… Did you try singing to her? Well what did you sing? No, no, I told you that one doesn’t work… she seems particularly fond of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Under My Skin.’… Well don’t blame me – she’s the one who likes it… Twelve minutes now. Surely you can wait twelve minutes.”  
“Let me talk to her,” John offered. “Mrs. Hudson, I promise we’ll be there soon… Well she may have a bit of gas. Try laying her on her back and moving her feet in a bicycle motion… You have? Well, have you tried a massage? She’s just switched to formula, so she’s probably experiencing some digestive distress… That’s right, massage… Very well, Mrs. Hudson. See you in a bit.” He put the phone down and looked at Sherlock, who was rolling his eyes in reaction to Mrs. Hudson’s panic. “That woman will do us both in,” he laughed. He reached out his hand to give Sherlock the phone, but quickly pulled it back. “What is this?”  
“Oh, uh, that’s… that’s just a photograph.”  
“It’s Victoria.”  
“Yes, well…”  
“It’s Victoria, and she’s the background to your mobile.”  
“John, I merely captured the photo to study her facial expressions, so that I might determine her needs based on non-vocal communications.”  
“First of all, bollocks,” he replied. “And second of all, let’s just say you’re telling the truth. You still didn’t need to make it the first thing you see when you open your screen.”  
Sherlock grabbed the phone back defensively. “I just found it interesting, that photo. Thought I might, I don’t know, be reminded of it on occasion. Your daughter is quite expressive.”  
John smiled broadly.  
“Can’t imagine where she gets it from,” Sherlock said.  
…  
They arrived and relieved Mrs. Hudson from her nanny duties, Sherlock bringing Victoria upstairs and both men settling into their chairs. As soon as Sherlock began rocking, humming low under his breath, and patting Victoria’s back softly as he held her, she calmed down. Sherlock happened to look up at John in that moment, and he noticed the doctor giving him a very curious look indeed.   
“What?”  
“No. Nothing.”  
“What is that look?” the detective asked in a whisper.  
“Just, I… I’ve never seen you this… human.”  
“Oh stop it, will you?”  
She had started to coo softly now, and John leant forward. “I think I would very much like to hold my daughter now,” he said.  
Sherlock didn’t hesitate, simply handing over the baby to her father. “Would you like to rock her?”  
“I think that might be good,” he said. The two switched seats. “Wait… where did your chair go?”  
Sherlock pulled up a newspaper and opened it, hiding his face behind. “I was due for a new one.”  
“This is Mrs. Hudson’s chair,” John noted. “Where’s yours?”  
“Downstairs,” he answered curtly.  
“You gave up your chair for the rocking chair? You could have given up mine, you know. It wasn’t as if I was down here very much.”  
“But where would you have sat when you did decide to stay down here with us?”  
John only smiled because he knew Sherlock couldn’t see him.  
…  
“I think I’m going to put her down now,” John said later. “Would you like to move the cradle up to my room?”  
“Oh no, by all means, keep it in mine.”  
“Why? Surely you must want a break.”  
“On the contrary. She has inspired me to pick up new experiments and develop new theories that center around the central nervous system, among other things. For example, I notice that she has quite vivid dreams, and that her reactions might be related to the fact that she sleeps in my room, where she is surrounded by intellectual visual stimuli just before she falls asleep. I need to keep her in there for another week at least before separating her to see if she continues to dream without said stimuli.”  
“Is that all it is?”  
“Of course.”  
John smiled and nodded. “I’ll go put her down, then. In your room, naturally.”  
“It’s imperative that you do,” Sherlock told him. “For… science.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously, I am American. I was running this chapter by a friend before I posted, and she said she was fairly certain that funerals in Britain are very different than those in our country when it came to order of service and readings and that type of thing. I don't know if this is true. I wrote the funeral service as I know them to be, and unfortunately I've had to attend quite a few funerals lately.  
> In general, I am sure I will use words and phrases that aren't true to British vernacular. Forgive me.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several months after Mary's death, life goes on, and with it, new challenges.

“We know he couldn’t have climbed out through the roof, because the emergency exit is far too small to accommodate the culprit’s unusually broad shoulders. We know the burglar’s shoulders extended the length of the doorway, because we found trace evidence of cotton fibers from the man’s shirt at equal height on either side of the entrance, and indicating they were left as he entered. But how he exited – that is a different matter altogether.  
“Let us consider that the man entered, burglarized the office, and then heard someone coming. Why else would he leave in a manner inconsistent with the way he entered? The roof exit is clearly too small, and the lone window leads out over a five-story drop. We did not find a rope or any type of grappling device, nor does there appear to be a plausible possibility of any type of ladder, as no vehicle was seen near the building on any of the CCTVs at the time, so he must have escaped on foot. So how did he do it? Any theories?”  
Watson did not respond.  
“Very well, let us eliminate the impossible. He could not have fit through the roof exit, nor could he have survived from the window. That leaves us with the improbable secret entrance. I scoured the room and found nothing; however Lestrade was present at the time, going on and on about something or other, and in my desire to abandon the scene, I neglected to check the bookcase. As I see now, it is the most likely scenario. Seems so cliché doesn’t it, my dear Watson? But clichés are so for a reason, I suppose, and we must go to Mr. Cowerton’s office to inspect the room once more, where I suspect we shall find a passage behind the bookcase.”  
Still Watson sat, watching the detective drawing lines between pictures of suspects, finally circling one on the bottom right of the wall.  
“Charles Franklin,” he smiled. “Formerly Cowerton’s PA until he was arrested on suspicion of theft. He was found not guilty, but still lost his job. Seems likely he would find a reason to break in a steal those documents. I could take it from here, go down to Cowerton’s office, prove I was right about Franklin all along…” he looked over at Watson. “On second thought, I suppose that’s what the police are for.”  
Steps were heard descending from the upstairs, and Sherlock looked over at John, who had just appeared from his bedroom.  
“Were you calling her ‘Watson’?” He asked with a slight smile on one corner of his mouth.  
“Phone Lestrade, won’t you?” Sherlock asked him, disregarding the question. “Tell him what I’ve found.”  
“You did. You called her ‘my dear Watson.’”  
“And while you’re at it, phone for some takeout. I’m dying for Chinese.”  
John smiled and walked over to Victoria who, at almost nine months old now, was sitting upright in an infant seat, staring at the men as they spoke. Once she saw her father, she kicked her feet around and squealed happily, and John picked her up immediately.  
“She’s looking more and more like Mary each day, isn’t she?” John sighed.  
“She has your nose,” Sherlock remarked as he began removing the casework from the wall.  
“Poor thing,” John laughed. “Hold her while I make that call?” He handed Tori to Sherlock, who hoisted her onto his hip and offered her scribbled-on photos and papers, but keeping the strings of yarn away. He carried her to his chair, the rocking chair still, and sat her in his lap to face him.  
“When are you going to start walking? I meant to ask you last month. No, I know it’s still a bit away, but one should be prepared. The books all say between nine and sixteen months is within the normal--”  
“Books?” John interrupted.  
“I… thought you were making a phone call.”  
“Came in here for the menu,” he chuckled. “You read books on this?”  
Sherlock hemmed and hawed a bit before admitting. “Often I find myself bored, and since this child has ruined any attempts I may have once had at sneaking a cigarette in every now and then, I have been forced to find an alternative. Rather boring, I admit, but it fills the time.”  
“So you haven’t _enjoyed_ reading up on, you know, baby stuff?”  
“You have a couple phone calls to make, John.”  
He left with a snicker, calling from the next room.  
“Additionally,” Sherlock continued speaking, though somewhat quieter. “When will you begin speaking? And I mean, really speaking, not all this jibber-jabber.”  
She reached forward and grabbed his nose, eliciting a smile.  
“You do enjoy that, don’t you? Grabbing my nose or my lips or my ears. I feel compelled to tell you it’s not exactly painless, but I let you do it because I suppose you don’t know any better. Don’t do it to your daddy, though. He doesn’t need any more pain, does he?”  
“Daddy!”  
Sherlock’s eyes widened. “Y-yes,” he smiled in surprise. “Daddy. Is that your first word? Are you speaking now?”  
She pointed a finger at the detective and smiled. “Daddy!”  
“Oh… no. Um, I’m not… I’m your godfather. Can you say ‘godfather’?”  
“Daddy!” She bounced up and down in his lap, laughing. “Daddy!”  
Just then, John came around the corner and back into the room. “Food will be here in twenty minutes, and Lestrade says he can’t believe it took you so long.”  
“Took me so long?”  
“His words.”  
“Well you should have told him that’s the last time I do anything for him.”  
“It’s not the last time, and you know it.”  
“Yes, well…” he stood and walked with Victoria into the kitchen to find trays. “We’ll see about that.”  
“You’re having a bit of trouble there, mate,” John said. “Let me take her off your hands for a bit.”  
Victoria leaned into her father’s arms, but quickly looked back at Sherlock. “Daddy!”  
“Yes, darling!” John laughed in a pleased surprise. “You said Daddy! Sherlock, did you hear her?”  
“Yes, well, that was lovely,” he smiled.  
“Lovely?” John asked, his voice indicating a slightly offended tone. “You get more excited about a sale on scarves than you do about your goddaughter talking?”  
“I wear a lot of scarves.”  
“She just called my name,” John smiled proudly. “If you’re not going to enjoy it, I sure as hell am!”  
“I’ll just set up these trays, then?”  
“Daddy!”  
“There she goes again!”  
Sherlock eyed the way Victoria reached for Sherlock as she called for her daddy. Poor, oblivious John. And Sherlock felt an overwhelming guilt at ever allowing John’s child to confuse him for her father. Sherlock was godfather, and nothing more. Victoria would simply have to learn that.  
“Apples and rice or beans and barley?” John asked, showing two jars of pureed baby food to his daughter. She grabbed for the beans, and John nodded. “You see that? She’s opting for the veg. That’s my healthy little girl!”  
“She’s not choosing it for the vegetables. She’s choosing it for the label, which is green, which is her favorite color.”  
“How do you know that?”  
“I told you that I’ve been observing her.”  
“Oh yes,” John remembered. “Observing her for about seven months now. You still haven’t got around to bringing her up into my room, have you?”  
Sherlock found it difficult to both explain and make eye contact, so he said simply, “No. Not yet.”  
“I miss her during the night,” John said as he strapped her into her seat. “I’d like her company.”  
“She still wakes up on occasion,” Sherlock said. “She may even wake up more often in an unfamiliar environment.”  
“You’re being greedy with her.”  
“Nonsense!”  
“You’re keeping her all to yourself, aren’t you?”  
“If it means that much to you, of course you can move her bed to your room,” Sherlock said. John sensed the tone of his voice, the way he kept his head bowed low, and the manner with which he continually looked at Victoria with that smile in his eyes.  
“Clearly you don’t want to,” John told him. “And I know. But I really have had time to settle in now, and then some. It’s isn’t fair to ask you to keep her with you. It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to her. I feel like I’ve been abandoning her, and that makes me feel absolutely--”  
“You’re not abandoning her,” Sherlock interrupted. “You’ve been an excellent father, taking her for a stroll every afternoon, tending to her while I’m on a case those few times you weren’t able to assist, and you provide for her financially.”  
“But you know her favorite color and her favorite songs,” he rebutted. “You know the things about her that I should know, only I don’t because I work during the day and don’t see her at night. You’re more of a father to her than I am!”  
“No, no, please don’t say that. You’re clearly her father. And you’re a wonderful father.”  
“I know I’m her father,” he smiled. “I just wish I knew her as well as you do. I know that where she sleeps isn’t the most effective way to do that, but it’s a start.”  
Sherlock nodded. “I’ll move the bed up there right now.”  
John tried to tell him that now wasn’t necessarily the time, that it could wait until after they’d eaten, but with Sherlock, this was never an option. He would do what he set to do, and there was no convincing him out of it.  
…  
John settled Victoria’s bed into a corner of his room, which was much smaller than Sherlock’s. Around nine, Sherlock traveled up the steps with Victoria, who was finishing off her evening bottle.  
“Thank you, Sherlock. I’ll take her now.”  
“She’ll need you to sing to her,” he said. “I’ve compiled a list of songs she deems acceptable. Some nights, she prefers to sleep with this blanket, while other nights she absolutely must have this teddy bear. There’s no telling which is actually going to aid her tonight, as she never chooses until she has been placed in the bed. She will fall asleep on her own – she’s exceptionally well-behaved in that area – but she does sometimes wish for you to sit up beside her bed for a moment before she closes her eyes. Typical behavior. I’ve researched it.”  
“Thank you,” John said, “But I think I know how to get my daughter to go to sleep. What works for you may not necessarily be what works for me.”  
Sherlock nodded and turned to leave. “Erm… are you sure you’ll be alright?”  
“I’m sure, Sherlock.”  
“I meant her.”  
“Get out of here,” John laughed. “I’ve got this.”  
Once he’d left, John wrapped his daughter in his arms and began singing to her. It was easy enough at first, he thought, and the squirming after she’d finished her bottle was a bit annoying, but nothing more. Babies do this sort of thing, after all. And yes, he supposed Sherlock was right. She was in unfamiliar surroundings and it may have stimulated her interest and all that… whatever he had been saying before. He would simply apply all of Sherlock’s methods one-by-one, carrying her close to his body, singing, trying her blanket, her bear, whatever he thought would do the trick.  
One hour later, she was more awake than John.  
“Tori, darling, won’t you sleep for Daddy?”  
“Daddy…”  
“That’s right, darling! I’m Daddy, and I am very, very tired, and I would just love it if you would sleep for a little while… Sherlock, I can see your shadow under the door.”  
Sherlock cracked the door open a bit. “Need anything?”  
As soon as she saw him, Victoria leaned forward, away from John. “Daddy!” she shrieked with her little arms outstretched.  
The look on John’s face could have just killed Sherlock.  
“I guess she wants her daddy,” John stated, quite plainly, devoid of emotions, or so he thought.  
“She just calls all men Daddy, I’m sure,” Sherlock explained. “According to the book by Dr. Gustaffson, it’s not entirely uncommon.”  
“No, it’s alright. You are more her father than I am.”  
“No, John, please don’t say that. I’ll go get the book for you. You can see for yourself what it says.”  
John feigned a smile. “No, it’s fine. I should have believed you. When have you ever been wrong?”  
“A few times about some things,” he smiled. “As you’ve reminded me, I do occasionally get it wrong.”  
“Not this. You know her better than I do, and there’s no fixing that.”  
Sherlock picked up the child from John’s arms, where she instantly snuggled against him with her blanket clutched in one hand, and her other hand dangling free on the other side of her.  
“Hold her hand,” Sherlock suggested. “You can’t expect her to acclimate all at once.”  
John sat on his bed and held onto his daughter’s hand as Sherlock slowly swayed side-to-side to rock her to sleep.  
“Sing to her.”  
John looked up at him suddenly. “In front of you?”  
“John, I’ve seen you in the nude. I would hardly think singing was too intimate an act to show before me.”  
John thought for a moment. “When did you see me naked?”  
“John, do you want your daughter to sleep comfortably in your room tonight or do you want me to give you a lecture on how to insure you are properly concealing yourself under your dressing gown when you return from the shower?”  
John stared up at him for a moment. With a curious look, he glanced back down at his daughter and began to sing. “I’ve got you… under my skin…”  
Sherlock smiled as John sang, and it was no time at all before Victoria closed her eyes for the night. Sherlock urged John to accept her. “Hold her for a while before you put her down. Let her get used to it.” He stepped over to the bedside table and turned out the light. “Good night, John,” he whispered. “Call me up if you need me.”  
“Sherlock,” he called. “Please, don’t… don’t go just yet. He moved over on the bed. “Stay until I put her down, will you?”  
“You don’t need me,” he replied. “All you need is her, and all she needs is you.”  
“Not according to tonight,” he whispered. “I would feel better if you stayed just another moment. Please.”  
“John…”  
“For me?”  
By the dim light of the moon shining in the small window, Sherlock could see the sincerity on his face. “I suppose I can stay for a moment,” he said. “Only a moment, though.” He began to pull the chair from the desk.  
“No, here,” John said. “Stay beside us so that if she wakes up, she will see you.”  
Sherlock sat beside John. For several moments, it was a room of complete silence. John was a bit scared to put the child down. Sherlock would have suggested he put her down, but no. John must do this on his own, no matter how difficult it was to watch him struggle.  
“Listen, John, while we’re just sitting here,” he spoke finally, “I feel I should apologize. What she said, that whole Daddy business. I really did read where it is quite common for infants to associate all men as their father, since that is the primary function of the only man they know, and I would like to assure you that she is barely nine months old, and anything she says can’t be considered--”  
“She’s right.”  
“What?”  
“She’s right. You are her father just as much as I am, if not more so. Don’t apologize for her calling you Daddy. When we take her out, everyone assumes she’s yours, they’ve associated you with her father, and that’s where she’s learned it. It was nothing you did, and I’m certainly not offended. You are, in many aspects, her father. And I’m not offended that she thinks that way.”  
“You’re not?”  
“Of course not,” he smiled. “I thought I would be doing all of this alone, you know, after Mary died. I thought it would be me raising a child, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. Not alone. And for so long I wouldn’t have anything to do with her. But now, I know I’m not alone, and it’s wonderful. Yes, I would like to have a chance to bond with her, but I see that I need your help, and I must admit it is quite refreshing to have that help available when I need it.”  
Sherlock stared at the Watsons, watching them as John watched her and she dreamt of whatever it was she dreamt of. In that moment, his heart was full of things to say, encouraging things, things he’d never dare say in any other moment. But he held back. It was rather late, and they were all rather tired, and John needed to focus on his daughter, not on the detective.  
“You should try putting her down now,” Sherlock suggested.  
John nodded and stood, carefully placing the child inside the crib. “I think she’s out good.”  
“Yes, it seems so.”  
“You can go now, if you’d like.”  
“Hm? Oh, of… of course. Yes. Although I may occasionally check in unannounced.”  
“Why?”  
“To… make notes. I told you I had plans to eventually observe her in a foreign environment. Now she’s here, and it seems my perfect chance.”  
“Right. Notes. I’m sure that’s all it is.”  
Sherlock leant into the crib and placed a soft kiss to her temple. “Sweet dreams, my dear Watson.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John's been bonding with his daughter, but for the first time is actually inconveniencing himself for her. I think he'll be rather good at fatherhood, don't you?


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John leave Victoria with Molly.

“I’m not very good with kids.”  
“Molly, I have seen you with Lestrade’s children. You have a very charming way with them.”  
“Yes, but, Sherlock, they’re 13 and 15. They rather enjoy witnessing an autopsy – you know, seeing all the brains and guts and things… This is different.”  
“I bring her here all the time, so she’s accustomed to the environment. Besides, it’s only going to be for an hour. I just need to look over a crime scene, and when have you ever known that to take longer than a few minutes?”  
“But… where will I keep her?”  
“I’ve taken the precaution of securing a fenced play area inside your office. Of course, it is only a temporary measure, but the gate is secure, all harmful objects got out of the way, and her favorite toys all about.”  
“My office?” Molly asked. She glanced over to the back of the lab, where her enclosed office sat. “When? I was just in there not twenty minutes ago.”  
“Please, Molly,” Sherlock asked finally. “I really will be back shortly. Please. You know what John has been through, the poor thing. And I’m afraid I have had to bear the burden of raising a child while struggling to keep my drug habit under control which, as I’m sure you can imagine, has been rather difficult. I hate to put you in this position, Molly, but I will tell you that Mrs. Hudson has felt a complete burden lately, and her drinking is so much worse now than it has been in years. Putting Victoria in that environment would be most incompetent of me, so if you would just--”  
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” She sighed. “I suppose if it means enough for you to make up all that rubbish, I have to help. The effort you put forth alone warrants my cooperation.”  
“I should have been cross with you all along,” he told her. “There’s absolutely no lying to you anymore.”  
“And the real reason Mrs. Hudson can’t watch her?”  
“Bridge night.”  
“Alright. This isn’t really my area, but I’ll give it a go.” She reached her arms out for the baby, and fell back a little under the weight. “Oh! Healthy baby, eh?”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sherlock asked, his voice defensive.  
“No, I just meant… She seems much smaller before you hold her!”  
“Is that a joke?”  
Molly shook her head. “I’m just not used to babies, is all.”  
Sherlock sighed. “One hour. I promise.”  
…  
Sherlock found himself with John at a modest flat in central London, an older building – not one of the posh types. He stood at the top of the stairs and observed the doorway for a bit before entering.   
A man’s body lay on a sofa against one wall. The man was on his back, eyes and mouth closed as if he were sleeping. One arm hung over the side with the hand almost touching the floor, and both feet were propped upon the arm of the sofa. Sherlock walked back and forth in front of the body for several moments before kneeling beside it.  
“No sign of a struggle,” Lestrade commented.  
“The vase on the mantel and the basket of magazines beg to differ,” Sherlock remarked.  
“What?” Lestrade glanced back at the mantel, then over at the basket. “What do you mean?”  
“John,” Sherlock said simply as he examined the body further. “Mantel.”  
John walked over and quickly noticed the dust imprint that indicated the vase had been moved. “Yeah,” he remarked. “Someone knocked it over, set it back up afterward.”  
“And the magazines are arranged in chronological order except for the front five. That, too, was knocked over, and some of the magazines fell out, after which time someone rearranged them, not knowing how meticulously they were being kept. Which means it obviously wasn’t our friend here,” Sherlock smiled, nudging his head the direction of the dead man.  
“Why would the murderer straighten up? He left a dead man here,” Lestrade wondered aloud.  
“Did he?” Sherlock muttered.  
“The man is dead, Sherlock. I’m no medical expert, but I know a corpse when I see one.”  
“The murderer staged this to look like a death by accidental overdose. He or she heavily drugged this man’s drink – whiskey, lots of whiskey – and believed he would come home and die here, after which time the murderer would stage a scene. Unfortunately for our amateur, too much medication was used, and this man died while with the murderer. Apparently they were in a place that would be a dead giveaway, no pun intended, to who the murderer was, so he or she drove the body out here to stage it anyway, but with an added obstacle – an overweight dead man. So, by balance of probability, it was a man who staged the scene after murdering him. No more than one man, as another involved party would have been able to insure a properly staged scene. Some things were knocked down as the body was brought in – the vase on the mantle as this man’s stiff, dead arm swiped the vase off of it, and the magazine basket as the man’s foot caught in it and made a bit of a mess. The body was laid on the sofa, the murderer straightened up the room to make sure it looked like a suicide or an accident, and then he returned to his vehicle to retrieve the props for the rest of the set up. Someone saw him outside, however, and he panicked and left before he could come back.   
“We know it is a man who owns his own vehicle, a strong man who can, though not without some difficulty, maneuver a corpse of this size around the room, a man who knew the victim socially, as he had him over at his place for drinks. We also know there is a witness – a living witness – who probably doesn’t even know what they’ve witnessed since this has only been called in by the housekeeper. The man’s home will be one that resides no less than one hours’ distance judging by how long the man has been dead and the fact that the body would have been stiff for some time, although this man would have needed to be dead at least three hours before he was brought here judging by the rigor mortis. That’s enough to get you going, isn’t it, Lestrade? You’ve got it from here, I trust.”  
“Wait, you actually want _me_ to track down the killer?” Lestrade asked in disbelief.   
“It may be hard for you to believe, but there are more pressing matters at hand than this murder.”  
John smiled, but tried to hide it. “Yes, Greg,” he agreed. “Sherlock happens to be working another case simultaneously. And I’m afraid he requires my assistance.”  
Sherlock smiled at John. “Good evening, Gary.”  
Sherlock and John headed out the door and to the street for a cab, Sherlock smiling all the while as John commented, “Leaving a baby with Molly Hooper is a very pressing matter, I agree.”  
“She’s alright,” Sherlock told him. “I’ve been gradually working her up to nanny. Started with having her watch after a Venus Fly-Trap, then it was a guinea pig, a dog, and last month I borrowed a baby chimp from the traveling circus. Told her it was a lab experiment, and that if she put him down even once, he might retaliate in a most undesirable manner.”  
“Our baby is not a chimp!” John shouted, smiling all along in spite of his slight disgust for Sherlock’s analogy.  
But Sherlock could not smile. He kept his arm raised uncomfortably as it had been for a minute hailing a cab, but he wasn’t calling a cab anymore. “What did you say?”  
“I said our baby is not a chimp,” John laughed.  
Sherlock lowered his arm.  
“Are you alright, Sherlock?”   
He looked at John. Hadn’t stopped looking for three minutes.  
“Seriously? Are you upset? I know you only meant well. The bit about you comparing her to a chimp – I was only joking. I know you wouldn’t do that for real.”  
Sherlock blinked finally.  
“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”  
A cab pulled alongside them, and John opened the door. “I said I’m sorry,” he said, now serious. “I don’t mind that you worked Molly out like that. It was probably the best way. It’s a bit rude, I guess, but your experiments always work.  
“It’s… not that.”  
“Well then what is it?”  
Sherlock followed John into the cab. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking about something.”  
“About what?”  
“What you said,” he told John. “About Victoria being _our_ baby.”  
“She is our baby.”  
“She’s _your_ baby.”  
“No,” John shook his head. “You raised her, too.”  
Sherlock looked curiously at John. He was used to looking at John like this, in the way he knew John wouldn’t see. In the way that he would never let John see him. He looked at him like he was facing something he didn’t understand, or something that, even worse, he _couldn’t_ understand. But John usually wasn’t looking at him when he looked at John like this.  
John turned his head to face him. Now he saw. And Sherlock couldn’t look away.  
“What?”  
Sherlock gulped hard and opened his mouth to speak. “You think of her as mine as well?”  
“Of course,” John smiled. “You’re her daddy. Wasn’t me that said that. She did.”  
“But you…”  
“I’m her father. Or, you know, her papa or her other daddy or whatever she chooses to call me. But you’re daddy, too. She says so.”  
“She’s not even a year old.”  
“Well then I say so,” he told him. “If you don’t mind, that is.”  
Sherlock stared at the floor of the cab. “I don’t mind,” he mumbled.  
“Right,” John beamed, asking the cabbie to take them to Bart’s. “Let’s get our baby.”  
…  
They tried not to reveal to each other how apprehensive they were about entering the lab to see whether Molly had survived. They weren’t even particularly worried about Victoria.   
“Fiver says she’s crying,” John remarked.  
“No bet.”  
They entered the lab, finding it empty. But Sherlock could see through the window of the tiny office in back that Molly was sitting on the edge of her desk.  
“We’ve been walking!” Molly smiled. “You should have told me she could walk.”  
“She walks!” John exclaimed.  
“She walks?” Sherlock asked, watching his daughter.  
“She walks,” Molly gushed. “She’s a perfectly lovely child, too. Helped me file my slides and everything. Didn’t try putting them in her mouth or smashing them or any of that other nonsense that some babies I know would do.”  
“She’s an angel,” John beamed, lifting his daughter. “Thank you so much for looking after her.”  
“No, it was my pleasure! Any time!”  
“I should probably gather her things,” Sherlock told John. “Why don’t you take her home? I’ll meet you there.”  
John left, and Sherlock helped Molly fold up the gate and gather the toys for a moment before she spoke.  
“You’re quite the little dad, aren’t you?”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“Oh, you know,” she grinned at him, “You and John raising a baby. You seem to be pretty good at it.”  
“If you say so.”  
“Bit romantic, too.”  
“It would do you a great deal of good to refrain from Saturday matinees, Molly.”  
“I’m just saying, it’s all you’ve ever wanted. Good to see you’ve finally got it.”  
“Got it? Got what? Wanted what?”  
“You know,” she smiled a bit uncomfortably. “You and John and baby makes three.”  
“Really, I don’t know--”  
“You’ve always wanted that, haven’t you? Domestic life with John.” Sherlock looked up at her, placing the last of the toys in a large pack. “And now you’ve got it. I wish the two of you only happiness.”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
“When I walked into the lab – this lab, in fact – that afternoon when you and John and Mike were in here, I knew that was sort of the beginning of the end. I mean, I guess I always supposed I wouldn’t have a chance with you, but that sealed it for me.”  
“Molly…”  
“It’s alright. I believe in soulmates, and I’m not yours. And that’s okay, Sherlock. Really it is.”  
“Molly…”  
“But he’s yours. He’s yours, and you’re his.”  
“Soulmates,” he started after a moment of uncertain silence, “Are a ridiculous notion. As soon as you abandon those foolish fantasies, you may find that you are happy despite your long and detailed history of failed relationships.”  
Molly smiled. “That wasn’t very nice, but thank you.”  
“I simply meant that you have much more to offer than your vast knowledge of cliché romantic terms and interest in men who are too thick to notice you.”  
“I think I understand,” Molly smiled, smoothing down the collar of Sherlock’s coat tenderly. “One day I will find someone just like you found John.”  
“I didn’t find John.”  
“Alright, well, he found you…”  
“We didn’t find each other. Sometimes people meet. It’s chance. It’s not fate.”  
“If anyone was fated for another, it’s John for you. You’ve changed in the last few years. I think that’s why I’ve found it easier to come to terms with the reality of it all.”  
“You liked me better before I met John?”  
“Before John made you a better person,” she corrected him. “I always thought I’d be the person to do that.”  
Sherlock smiled. “You did.”  
“Not like he did. Not like he still does.”  
Sherlock was silent. It was a rare moment when anyone made him wonder about himself, but Molly had done it. Molly had seemed to be very good at making Sherlock wonder about himself. He still wasn’t sure if it was a good thing.  
“I had a lovely time with Victoria,” Molly told him as they walked out of the lab together. “She’s a wonderful baby, really.”  
“But?”  
“But this isn’t something I’m cut out for. Maybe if I ever have a baby of my own, it will work then. But I don’t think I’m very good with babies. I must have bored her.”  
“You got her to walk,” he replied without hesitation. “That’s the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to her.”  
“I suppose.”  
“I missed it,” he then said, his face frowning. “Right, the whole walking business – I should have seen it when it happened. I’m not sure I like that I wasn’t here.”  
“If you’d like, I’ll never let on that she walked for me. You can make a little video of her in your flat, and for the rest of your life you can claim that those were her first steps. Just get John to keep the secret, and it’s settled.”  
“That’s an awful lot of work for such a small lie.”  
“Right. You only go in for great, big whales of lies, don’t you?”  
…  
“She’s sleeping already?”  
“Molly must have worn her out,” John answered, closing the door of his bedroom behind him.  
“All that walking, no doubt.”  
“No doubt.”  
Sherlock settled into his chair, and John sat opposite as per usual. “Next case?”  
Sherlock continued to steeple his fingers beneath his chin, only noticing John had spoken after he repeated himself. “Oh, I haven’t checked.”  
“Would you like me to?” John offered. “I’ve got my laptop on already, so it’s no trouble.”  
“No, really, John,” he said. “It’s alright. It can wait.”  
“If you say so…” He responded. He sat back and opened the paper, looking up every ten or so seconds to see what Sherlock was doing. The detective would occasionally peek over at the stairs or to the fireplace or even to the telly even though it wasn’t on. “What’s going on?”  
“Hm? No. Nothing.”  
“Something.”  
“Nothing.”  
“Sherlock.”  
“John.”  
“Sherlock, what are you doing?”  
“Thinking. You should try it.”  
“You’re not thinking. You’re… fidgeting.”  
“What?”  
“You’re fidgeting. You want to smoke, don’t you?”  
“No! No, of course not!”  
“You want something,” he insisted. “Tell me.”  
“I… don’t… no. I don’t.”  
“What do you want, Sherlock?” John snickered. “It’s getting almost funny now. You’re like a child sometimes.”  
“A child,” Sherlock echoed. “You see me as a child.”  
“I see you as you are. Sometimes you’re a bit of a child, yes.”  
Sherlock stood calmly and turned toward the hallway. “I’m going to bed,” he announced.  
“Oh, stop it,” John laughed, finding the moment too absurd to address seriously. “What do you want, Sherlock?”  
He turned back around to face John. For a moment, he stood there, just looking him in the eye. He breathed deeply, taking a few steps until he was less than an arm’s distance from his friend. He pursed his lips, stood tall, and exhaled. “I want you to be happy.”  
John was stunned, and visibly so. “I… am.”  
“No. I mean I want you to be happy like you used to be. Not just satisfied. Happy. Going out, having friends, dating again.”  
“I don’t want to date again.”  
“It’s been nine months since she died, and even before she did, you were ready to move on. You’ve never been able to go this long without acting on your physical desires. You’re tired and bored and you need to go out and be happy.”  
“I’m happy.”  
“No you’re not.”  
“Yes, I am!” He insisted. “I am! I have everything I need!”  
“But do you have everything you want?”  
John stopped to think. “Yes. Without a doubt.”  
Sherlock sighed. “I suppose there’s no helping you. But know that when you realize you’re wrong, you have my support to move on with your life.”  
“I moved on a long time ago, Sherlock. I’m happy now. I have everything I need. I have a roof over my head, and I have a beautiful child, and…”  
Sherlock paused, speechless, waiting for the rest of the sentence.   
“My…”  
He wondered why John was so hesitant to speak those last words. He would have deduced the answer, but he felt broken. Just in that moment, he felt too broken to even try.  
“You,” John finished. “I have you.”  
Sherlock reached his hand out to grip the back of John’s chair as un-dramatically as possible. “And… you’re happy with that?”  
John smiled, moving back to his chair to sit down and open his paper. “Of course I am. Who wouldn’t be?”  
“I could name names.”  
John smiled. “Well I’m not one of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely feedback thus far. If you have questions or comments, I would love to hear.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John considers a job offer.

John had decided not to think too hard about whether or not he was happy. He knew he was. The hows and whys were unimportant.  
He had left his job at the clinic long ago. He found it hard to go back, to answer patients’ questions about what happened to the lovely nurse, or from those who knew who Mary was, condolences for the loss of his wife. Yes, he and Mary had been at unease for a long while before her death, but he loved her. He knew that as sure as he knew his name. And seeing her empty desk chair proved too trying to warrant his staying.  
Besides, he and Sherlock were living together again, sharing rent and solving crimes. He didn’t need to scrape throats and analyze piss and remove unconventional objects from all manner of orifices.   
It was the week before the anniversary of Mary’s passing that John noticed things were different lately. Sherlock still conducted random experiments at all hours of the night, but the noxious fumes had been dispelled. He played his violin when he needed to think, but his compositions were in the form of lullaby rather than the melancholy tunes he’d been writing for years. And perhaps the most noticeable difference was that, for the first time since John had known him, Sherlock was eating and sleeping on the most regular schedule of which he was capable.  
“Chicken parmesan from Angelo’s?” John asked just after Victoria had finished her evening meal.  
“I wouldn’t have it from anywhere else short of Italy herself,” he answered. “What’s the occasion?”  
“Just… thought you might be hungry. You usually eat with her.”  
“I’m growing strep cultures. Doesn’t seem like a very good idea to eat around her at the moment.”  
Without batting an eye, John nodded as he reached for the phone. “I’ll call down there. Anything else?”  
Sherlock shook his head. “No, I’m quite busy here. I don’t know that I’ll even eat the chicken. Still, you may as well order it. You never know.”  
John ordered dinner for them before taking Victoria off for a bath. “Wine?” he asked in passing.  
“Wine not?” Sherlock smiled.   
“Stick to science, Sherlock. You’re rubbish at puns.”  
He tucked their daughter into bed and decided to rush to the restaurant, then to pick a suitable white to compliment the meal. When he returned, much to his delight, Sherlock had finished his experiment, and sat at the table observing his slides as he did nearly every evening for one case or another.  
“That’s an expensive wine,” Sherlock remarked. “And you’re placing the meal on your mother’s china. What gives?”  
“Just thought we might, you know, have a quiet evening in. You know, dinner and wine and relaxation.”  
“Why?” Sherlock looked at the doctor skeptically. “This isn’t like you.”  
“Sherlock, in a year I haven’t had one night like this. Not one night with a decent meal with my friend in my home with a sleeping happy baby in the other room and a nice glass of wine to help me relax. It’s been too long. I think it’s due, don’t you?”  
“Right.” Sherlock nodded and pulled the plate closer to him. “It has been a year, hasn’t it?”  
“More or less.”  
“One year this Tuesday.”  
“Yes. If you say.”  
“John, if you’d like to get your mind on something else, this may not be the way to do it.”  
“I need some normalcy right now, Sherlock. I need to do something that reminds me that I’m not in hell. That even though I don’t have her to give me that domestic life I needed, I can still have a peaceful dinner. And that’s all I ask. Dinner. Is that so much to expect?”  
“No,” Sherlock answered. “But I hardly think dinner will fix things.”  
“Let’s just…” John was becoming frustrated, his words adamant now. He allowed himself a moment to calm down. “Let’s just enjoy this.” He poured himself a too-tall glass of wine, and Sherlock took care not to say another word until prodded.  
They were seated in the living room, John on his third glass of wine and Sherlock on his first still, when John finally spoke again.  
“She was the love of my life, you know.”  
Sherlock looked over at John, that glazed look in his eyes, almost drunk. White wine makes for a hell of a hangover.  
“Yes. So you’ve said.”  
John once again fell silent. They sat alone for several minutes before he continued.  
“She helped me get over it.”  
Sherlock nodded. He was tired, after all, and he meant to sleep as soon as dinner ended.  
“Why didn’t you tell me?”  
Sherlock looked at John, puzzled. “Tell you what?”  
“You’re the master of deductions. You should have seen it. Why didn’t you see it?”  
“I had no way of knowing what she was. Not when I was so close to her, and when she was so close to you. I have a hard time deducing those closest to me. It is perhaps my greatest weakness. My only weakness, some might say.”  
“Only weakness?” John giggled. “No, you have all kinds of weaknesses. All kinds.”  
Sherlock’s eyebrows furrowed, and he smiled a bit curiously at his friends. “Oh?”  
“Would you like me to name some things?” John asked, and at Sherlock’s shrug he continued. “You act all dangerous and carefree, but you care very much about some things, Sherlock. And you care about your reputation even more than people.”  
“Really?” Sherlock could think of several examples, one glaringly obvious above the others, that would disprove his claim.  
“You put me in dangerous situations because you know I’ll do it. Then I take the brunt of it while you run off and solve the crime and look clever.”  
Again, Sherlock could count the examples to prove this wrong.  
“And Mary wouldn’t have died, you know, if you’d told me the truth sooner. She’d be in prison, or she’d be a thousand miles away, but she wouldn’t be dead.”  
This was a fact Sherlock could not deny. And this is what finally prompted him to speak.  
“She made a sacrifice I could not have foreseen,” Sherlock said. “She was protecting you and the baby--”  
“And you,” John interrupted. “You’re always in the middle of these things.”  
“She wasn’t considering me,” he answered. “Everything she did was for you. It was always for you.”  
“So it’s my fault she’s dead?”  
“It’s… no. No, she did make the decision to take the bullet for you. But you couldn’t have stopped her. No one could. She knew what she was and she knew her debts and she knew that if you or I died in her place, that Moran would still come looking for her. She made a decision to end it all there, and you could never have stopped it.”  
John stared into the fire for a very long while after Sherlock spoke. He finished off his glass and set it beside him, stretching his legs closer to the flames for warmth. “I just hurt for Tori,” he mumbled. “I wish she could have known her mother.”  
“She still can. And what’s more, you can tell her anything you wish about her mother. Perhaps it’s better this way.”  
“Better this way?” John scoffed. “It’s not better this way!” He rose from his chair and stepped into the kitchen. “Where’s the Scotch?”  
“All I meant is that you are at a considerable advantage when it comes to Victoria knowing the truth about her mother. Mary’s secret died with her. Victoria will only know the good things.”  
“You don’t think she should know the truth?”  
“That will be the truth. There were many good qualities in Mary, and they weren’t lies.”  
John found the bottle in the cupboard and helped himself to a tumbler full. Once he’d taken a sip, wincing at the stark contrast in taste after the wine, he moved back to his chair and sat again, a solemn look in his eye.   
He was remembering Mary, Sherlock deduced.  
“When you left,” John muttered finally, “It was very hard for me. I cried. Oh, god, did I cry.”  
“And Mary was there to help--”  
“Let me say this,” John interrupted. “Because I might not say this sober, and if this is the only chance I get, I need you to let me say this.”  
Sherlock took note of every line in John’s forehead, the dead stare in his eyes as he looked at him, the corner of his mouth as he spoke, the manner with which his fingers curled around the glass, how he crossed his legs, his posture, his tone of voice. He could have written a blog entry just on John Watson’s body language in this moment: Defensive, assertive, cold, eager, a man who felt extreme insecurities when it came to his parenting, and who was confident on only one thing – his friendship with the detective. Clearly John was going to say something he had meant to say for some time. This was not a deduction, but rather something that John himself had just said. Could it be something harsh? The crease between John’s eyebrows certainly seemed to indicate that. But was he going to say something that would be difficult for Sherlock to accept? Probably not. No. Not with the way John sat comfortably. John never could say anything that would hurt Sherlock, and certainly not without plenty of warning beforehand.   
“I never imagined it like this,” John started softly. “Before you died, I imagined something similar, but it wasn’t this. It was never this. I imagined I would spend the rest of my life chasing bad guys like some Hollywood G-man, trusty sidekick to the world’s only consulting detective. That was what I imagined, Sherlock. That was what I wanted.”  
In that moment, Sherlock wished to interject with his opinion on the matter, to remind John that that was still possible. That, as he had told him not long before, the game was never over, though there may be some new players. But John had asked for silence, and Sherlock had always been careful to give John whatever he wanted.  
“When you died, I looked for ways to retreat into my old habits. I locked myself away in cheap hotel rooms until I found a place. I drank my liver yellow, and I cried, like I said. Because you weren’t supposed to be dead, Sherlock. You weren’t allowed to do that to me.  
“And then I met Mary. And for six months, everything was wonderful. I had a home and a life and a job again. I was going to get married. I was finally going to have that life I imagined. I was going to be happy, Sherlock, in spite of you.  
“And then you showed up. Why did you show up, Sherlock? Why? I was happy! You came along and took me back into this world of crime-fighting and car chases and danger. That wasn’t what I wanted!”  
“That _was_ what you wanted.”  
“Not with Mary. I never wanted Mary to be a part of this life. I wanted her to be the normal one. I wanted her to be the one who proved that I could be happy even without you.”  
“You can be,” Sherlock frowned.   
“Not here.” He stood and walked to his bedroom quite suddenly, leaving Sherlock confused, though only for a moment before he returned with an envelope in hand. “I’ve been talking to Mike Stamford,” he said, handing the letter to the detective. “He’s teaching at a college in San Francisco, in America. He told me about a position open there teaching a class to pre-med students. Pay is good, location is good. I’m considering taking it.”  
Sherlock read over the letter three times before looking back at John. “You’re thinking… of… leaving?” He whispered, too shocked to speak louder.  
“I care for you dearly,” he said. “I can’t repay you for all you’ve meant to me, and for all you’ve done for Victoria. You’ve been nothing short of a life-saver, and I owe you everything for that. But I think I need to do this. I think the change might be good.”  
“You would take her?”  
“Well of course I would,” he said. “It’s not like it would be a permanent thing. They’ll try me out for a year, and if they like me, I have the option of staying on. I think I need to do this.”  
“You said you were happy,” Sherlock spoke, his words sharper and his voice just louder than before. “I asked you.”  
“I am. Really. But I need to get away from this. All the signs tell me I should leave.”  
“The signs?” Sherlock shouted. “The only sign you need is this, me, standing before you telling you this is a ludicrous mistake. You will regret this, John. You know you will.”  
“I don’t think I will.”  
“Doesn’t the fact that I am telling you mean anything? Or the fact that I consider Victoria my own? Or the fact that I have done everything I can possibly do to make you happy and to provide a suitable place for both of you?”  
“I told you, I am eternally grateful for all you’ve done, but I have more reasons to go than to stay.”  
“You have silly reasons for leaving. Silly, absolutely unfounded reasons. You can’t make this decision now, John.”  
“I think this is the best time to make this decision, actually.”  
Sherlock aggressively swiped the glass from John’s hand, flinging it to the floor, where it spun to the corner and made a most startling crashing noise. “You’re drunk!” He shouted.  
“Keep your voice down!” John answered at the same volume, stepping closer to Sherlock in a confrontational manner. “You’ll be better off without me,” he continued. “You won’t have me slowing you down or holding you back.”  
“But I love her!”  
John was silent as he heard the words escape Sherlock’s lips, saw the instant look of desperation across his countenance, and felt the awkward tension that the words had caused as it filled the room.  
“You do?” John asked softly.  
Sherlock paced around the room, avoiding eye contact. He held the palms of his hands to his eyes and pressed them there, frustrated, eager, angry. “Of course I do,” he grunted deeply.  
“I’ve never heard you express that you loved anything, much less a human being.”  
Sherlock looked over at John, who was flashing a lopsided smile his direction. “Stop. This isn’t funny.”  
“It’s a little funny,” he grinned.  
“John, I’m serious!” he approached John fiercely, attempting to intimidate him enough to sober him up. “I’ve never been so serious about anything in my life. If you leave, and if you take her with you, it would destroy me.”  
Finally the smile disappeared. John furrowed his brow, concerned, suddenly aware of how much this meant to Sherlock. “You really do love her,” he stated, no longer questioning him, no longer confused as to whether it was the truth.  
“Please tell me,” Sherlock begged, “that you will stay.”  
John stepped closer to Sherlock to get a better look. Was there any hint of a joke? Any ulterior motive behind his words? A false façade behind that face?  
“You do understand, Sherlock, that one day I may move out anyway, even if it’s not to another country? You understand that even if I promise to stay here now, that doesn’t mean I’ll stay forever?”  
“I’d rather not understand,” he answered softly.  
“It’s not like…” he smiled again, this time forced, “Like we’re married or something.” He began to chuckle a bit because, dear god, he needed to bring a bit of lightheartedness to the room.  
Sherlock allowed one lone tear to fall along his cheek. “Please don’t go, John.”  
“I’ll stay,” he sighed. “But how do I stop thinking about it all? How do I escape this hell of living here with the guilt of what I’ve caused?”  
“This wasn’t you,” Sherlock reminded him. “This wasn’t either of us. This was Mary.”  
“I miss her.”  
Sherlock nodded, sitting again. “As do I.”  
John also sat. He leaned back and smiled fondly at nothing in particular. “I scared you,” he remarked.  
Sherlock would not respond. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at the fire until he felt drawn to fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, the San Francisco thing? It's ACD canon that John served for a time as a doctor there. So just in case you were wondering, that's where that idea came from.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock is worried about John's drinking.

As Sherlock had pointed out, white wine makes for a hell of a hangover.  
It was five days in row that John had woken up in this matter – throbbing headache, aversion to food, vomiting, aching, and overall sore mood. Sherlock was sure to have Mrs. Hudson prepare a pot of coffee in addition to their morning tea, and without questioning why it was there, the doctor would help himself to several cups full, cream, no sugar.  
Each night Sherlock made a careful and ultimately ineffective attempt at getting John to lay off the liquor, and every night, Sherlock sacrificed his bedroom for John.   
He couldn’t have him falling down the stairs.  
He hadn’t had to bother moving the baby, because he ended up with her anyway. No more worrying about whether it was an inconvenience to John. He knew now that John was dealing with things his own way and that, even if it didn’t make much sense to Sherlock, perhaps it was all better this way.  
But the anniversary of Mary’s death had come and gone, and nothing had seemed to change. Seeing John in this state, eyes never fully open, slurred speech, complete loss of any sense of humour, was killing Sherlock by means of a slow, painful torture.  
It always started just after Victoria was down for the night. For that, Sherlock was at least grateful. John would never be so irresponsible with his habit, because even under the influence of alcohol, John Watson was a good man, and an even better father.  
This night in particular, however, Sherlock watched John as he descended the stairs, having rocked his daughter to sleep. And he watched him make his usual turn straight for the wine cupboard. And he had seen him grab the first glass he found and saunter into the living room, falling into his chair opposite Sherlock.  
“John, before you start…”  
“Before I start?” John laughed. “I’m sorry if this is some sort of show for you.”  
“No, I didn’t mean that,” he insisted. “Not at all. I just meant--”  
“What did you mean, Sherlock? Hm? Are you going to give me another one of your speeches on how irresponsible this is, or about how at this rate, my liver has decreased in something or other, or has turned a shade of some color, or is heading me toward an early grave?”  
“No,” he answered truthfully. “I wasn’t going to say any of that.”  
“Good. Because I know I’ve been drinking a lot. I know. If you think I have no excuse, I’d love to hear. Or if you have a really, truly valid reason I should stop now, hit me.” He poured a glass and took a small sip, sitting back, ready to listen. Ready to rebut.   
“Alcoholism is a genetic disease, John. Your sister has it, and now you are beginning to show signs. And I cannot bear to see that happen to you.”  
“So I have a few drinks when I’m sad. Who doesn’t?”  
“Still, it… worries me.”  
John had almost had another sip, but as he heard the words, he lowered his glass and widened his eyes a bit in surprise. “It worries you? You worry?”  
Sherlock avoided eye contact in every possible way, resorting to pretending there was some sort of stain on the ceiling, and then pretending he actually cared about it. “Yes… well. I shouldn’t like to see you ill, is all.”  
“Well aren’t you just the surprise of the night?” John chuckled. “You care about me.”  
“Surely that’s no surprise to you.”  
“No, but it’s always a surprise to hear you say it. I feel like our relationship is moving rather well, Sherlock. I should buy you a ring, make it all formal.”  
“John, please don’t make jokes like that.”  
John eyed the detective quizzically before a look of shame crossed his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”  
“You didn’t offend me,” Sherlock responded, finally looking at John again. “It’s just… I am getting a bit tired of those words, those sentiments being treated as trivial.”  
“What words? What sentiment?”  
“Any time anyone speaks of us in that manner, they treat it as a joke. It isn’t a joke, John.”  
“Well of course it is!” He laughed. “We’re not a couple!”  
Sherlock nodded. “Yes. I know.”  
Perhaps it was the extra glint of light in Sherlock’s eye or the way his posture slumped as he sat there, looking at John in silence after those few words, but something or other had caused John to come to an epiphany of sorts.  
“Sherlock, why would you not consider it a joke if it’s not true?”  
“Because it’s not true,” he answered.  
“I don’t understand.”  
“Because it will never be true. And because it isn’t right to make a joke of someone’s feelings.”  
“Do you,” John started cautiously, “Have… feelings?”  
“I’m not a machine, John, in spite of your previous assumptions of the sort.”  
“I know that,” John smiled. “That was another joke. It’s funny because it’s not true.”  
“Clearly you’re incapable of understanding,” Sherlock said with a shake of his head. “I suppose you’ll say what you’d like anyway, so why do I even bother?”  
“I’m really trying to see this from your perspective,” John insisted. “A little explanation would be nice.”  
The clock struck ten, and Sherlock looked over at it glumly. “Good night, John.” He rose from his chair and headed toward his bedroom.  
“No, no, wait,” John insisted, standing and following after. “Stop with all your little word play, stop with the insinuations, stop with the guessing games.” He had at this point stood in the doorway to Sherlock’s bedroom, blocking his entrance.  
“John, please don’t.”  
“Sherlock, tell me. You accuse me of keeping secrets about how I really feel, and I’ve told you everything. It’s your turn now.”  
“It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”  
“You don’t know that.”  
“Yes. Yes, I do.”  
“No, you don’t. Tell me.”  
“John…” Sherlock stared into John’s eyes, admiring them, their clarity, a welcomed sight after the past few days. “If I tell you, I’m afraid you’ll never see me the same way again.”  
“If you don’t tell me, you’re pretty much running the same risk.”  
Sherlock nodded. “I… I have always been happy for you. Always. Even when you made the decision to get married. And I adored Mary. You know I did.”  
“What’s the point of this?”  
“The point of this,” Sherlock answered firmly, “Is that no matter how often I see you, how often I speak with you, how happy I am for you, it is never enough.”  
“Enough for what?”  
“Don’t. Don’t make me say it. Please.”  
For a moment, John considered his request. He knew anyway. With no other option but to continue to belittle and intimidate his friend, he moved aside, and Sherlock entered his room in peace.  
“You know,” John said as he reached for the door. “You can tell me anything. You could always tell me anything, and it will never change how I see you.”  
Sherlock sat on his bed and began removing his shoes. “This would.”  
And if John hadn’t known before, he knew now.  
“Good night, John.”  
John nodded. “Good night, Sherlock.”  
John stood outside Sherlock’s door for almost five minutes before turning around. He made his way straight to his bedroom, looking down admirably at his little girl before retiring.  
…  
Four hours must have passed, John figured, by the time he felt the need to take some sort of home remedy to aid his sleep. He rose silently so as not to disturb Victoria, and took the steps carefully down to the kitchen for some warm milk.   
“Oh!” He said in surprise, seeing Sherlock in his dressing gown, seated at the table analyzing slides again. “You’re up, too? I thought you’d finished this for the night.”  
Sherlock continued to stare into the microscope. “Something occurred to me. I needed to check this one again.”  
“Something occurred to me too,” John chuckled. “I can’t sleep. Thought I might just warm some milk. Care for some?”  
“No, thank you,” Sherlock answered coldly.  
John began to warm the milk, an uncomfortable silence filling the small room as he did. “She’s sleeping well these days, isn’t she?”  
“Yes, I suppose she must be,” Sherlock answered. “You haven’t been nearly so tired as you were just a month ago.”  
“No, no I’m not. She’s a wonderful baby.”  
“Very near perfect.”  
John smiled, and of course Sherlock didn’t see. “Talking so much, laughing, running about.”  
“Mm, yes, she’s delightful.”  
As the milk began to bubble, John poured it into a mug and took a few sips, just watching Sherlock from the opposite end of the room. “You’re very busy with those, then?”  
“Yes,” he answered. “Afraid so.”  
“Then I won’t waste any more of your time,” he said, walking over to place the mug on the table. “Although, I feel I should break this tension here before the night is officially over.”  
“Tension?” Sherlock asked, only moving his eyes from the lens long enough to scribble a note. “There’s no tension.”  
“None at all, then? So you’re alright?”  
“Course I am,” he shrugged.  
John took one last, long sip and emptied his mug into the sink, rinsing it slowly, delaying on purpose to see if he was getting the truth from Sherlock. Admittedly, he wasn’t very good at deductions himself, but he had learned how to tell if Sherlock was fibbing. Mostly he had learned from Mary, who had previously been the only one who could tell.  
“Well, good night,” he sighed finally, resolute that he was getting nowhere.  
“Wait, John,” Sherlock called softly. “Come here.”  
John made his way beside Sherlock, stood just inches from him. Was he about to get some sort of confession? An apology for overreacting? Something completely unrelated because sometimes Sherlock was just a dick like that?  
Sherlock turned in his chair so that his eyes met John’s. A very firm, solid look crossed his face for a moment before it softened. Clearly he was looking for words.   
“What?” John asked. He just wanted the ordeal to be over with.  
“John,” Sherlock started. He kept looking down, then back up again. The floor. John’s eyes. The floor.  
“What?”  
“John, I…”  
Here it was. A confession. An apology. A hint at the human side of Sherlock Holmes.  
Sherlock very quickly, very uneasily, reached forth his hands, held John’s face for a moment, and placed a kiss directly on his lips.  
John stood frozen. Just... frozen.  
And Sherlock stood, turned the light off of his lens, and calmly walked back to his bedroom, locking his door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was able to post another today. It's short, as all my chapters tend to be. Hopefully since I update fairly regularly, this is okay with you guys. Anyway, I hope you liked it!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock solve a case away from home.

John didn’t talk about it the next morning.  
Sherlock didn’t talk about it the next morning.  
It remained this way: silent, smiling faces nodding a polite hello in the morning as the days’ duties wore on, evenings of uncomfortable silence as Sherlock composed and John pretended to read a book. Sherlock’s tunes were sometimes telling of his thoughts. But these wacky little tunes were all over the place, atypical of any method he’d employed in his writing before. And of course Sherlock knew John was thinking about it. He’d been on page 44 of Thurber’s _The Years with Ross_ for ten days now.  
The cases were dull, a five or six out of ten at best, but Sherlock took them, took every last one just to be out of the house. Sometimes John assisted. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes Sherlock brought Victoria. Sometimes Victoria stayed with Mrs. Hudson.  
Routine, schedule, regularity, and reliability were foreign ideas in the Holmes/Watson flat. Nothing was certain. Nothing was predictable. And much to Sherlock’s chagrin, everything, from the stories attempted clients posed to the off-season television programs was dreadfully, painfully boring.  
On Tuesday, a woman claimed someone was breaking into her flat each night and cleaning up.  
It was her daughter. Obvious.  
On Friday, a man believed his two dogs had had their memories erased by aliens.  
Not quite. The dogs had simply been stolen and replaced. How this man did not realize that these were entirely different dogs from his own was a mystery Sherlock didn’t bother to deduce the answer to.  
On the following Wednesday, a couple of teenagers said that they had built a website, only to have the idea stolen by fellow students.  
Not Sherlock’s problem. Hire a lawyer.  
Victoria was now walking and talking and filling the awkward days with enough entertainment to distract her parents. And before anyone had realized, those awkward days were uncomfortable weeks, and those weeks were unbearable months. Months of silence. Months of uncertainty.  
And of all people to save Sherlock, it was Lestrade who came through.  
“Got a case you boys might be interested in.”  
Sherlock didn’t ask what it was. “Tell me where.”  
Greg met them in a warehouse in Portsmouth, a structure that seemed ancient, unused, and typical of a scene from a cheap gangster thriller. Rusted steps wound throughout the inside of the building, wide glass windows, if you could still call them that when they were missing most of their glass, covered the façade, and the floor was mostly gravel and dirt, though there were the occasional signs of rodents and other vermin whose nests had inhabited every corner and crevice in the walls. In the midst of an overhead walkway lay a body – male, mid-teens, tall, thin, perhaps even underweight. New clothes, but cheap. No visible sign of cause of death, but give him a moment…  
“This place is a pretty popular drugs hangout,” Lestrade explained. “We got an anonymous call about this one.”  
Sherlock leaned over the body, noticing the traces of mud on his shoes (not unusual as it had rained heavily that day), well-manicured nails (explained by the fact that this young man was currently in a relationship and was attempting to keep a tidy appearance), and a plain gold ring he wore on his thumb (belonged to the lad’s deceased father). Besides that, nothing in particular stood out about the young man himself, however his immediate surroundings were incredibly telling.  
Several footprints had been left tracking mud up into the landing where the body had been found. Police initially attributed this to the men who discovered the body. But these weren’t the footprints of men who came for a drugs deal and left when they discovered a dead body. The prints were made by shoes of a popular brand and style for teenagers. They had been standing in a circle around the body, and they could be found very near the body, but in a different arrangement. It seemed like at some point, they had almost been standing beside each other. They had approached… something? Someone? There had been a meeting. Perhaps a presentation.  
“Asphyxiation,” John announced once he had examined the body. “No visible signs of strangulation or forcible choking. No fingerprints or that sort of thing.”  
“What’s in his throat?”  
John looked at Sherlock and shrugged. “What, you think he choked on a biscuit or something?”He asked in his charming, snarky way.  
Sherlock nodded. “Perhaps.”  
John used an examiner’s glove and opened the young man’s mouth. He searched for a bit with no result, but as he pulled his fingers from the throat, Sherlock noticed something very interesting indeed.  
“Excuse me,” he said, reaching his bare fingers to touch John’s gloved hands. He swiped his fingertips along the length of John’s thumb, something small and thin and black being removed.  
“What’s that?” Lestrade asked, standing too far away to see clearly.  
“An eyelash?” John asked.  
“It’s a leg,” Sherlock said.  
“A leg?”  
“The leg of a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. They can easily be ordered from various sites online. Obviously there was some sort of dare going on here, and this foolish young man was a little too eager to prove himself king on the mountaintop, so to speak.” He knelt down and ran his fingers along the boy’s throat, clenching along the Adam’s apple, throughout the windpipe, opening the mouth again and examining the throat in the dim light of the warehouse. “There must be at least three in there.”  
John was visibly shaken, disgusted, and repulsed. Greg didn’t seem to believe it could be so easily explained.  
“So… not a murder?” Greg asked.  
“Not a murder. Just stupidity. I would recommend spreading the word against this sort of thing as you are wont to do. Search YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find a video of kids engaging in this ‘dare.’ Bring them in and give them a scare. That should do the trick.”  
Greg nodded. “Right. Well…”  
“Why would anyone do something this stupid? Just for the sake of a laugh? Looking cool in front of their friends?” Sherlock was still huddled over the body, his brow furrowed and hands moving emphatically as he thought aloud. “I swear if my daughter ever does something like this or associates with arseholes who throw their lives away for the sake of a laugh--”  
“ _Your_ daughter?” Greg laughed.  
Sherlock looked up at him. “Thank you for dragging me to this completely boring and useless scene. It’s not even a crime scene. Just a… scene.” He spat the last word out and turned away with John to leave.  
“Your demeanor is certainly cheerful this evening,” John commented when they had left.  
Sherlock was silent.  
John found himself struggling to keep up with Sherlock, whose long strides carried him further faster than he could easily achieve. “You hear me? Sherlock?”  
Sherlock’s steps grew faster, harder, colder.  
“Sherlock,” John approached him. “Alright, I get it. You went out of your way to investigate a dead end and a boring case and Lestrade was an idiot and all that,” he pulled at Sherlock’s elbow once they had rounded a dark, deserted corner just across the street from their parked car. “But you’ve been taking every case we’ve been offered just to keep yourself busy. Compared to most of those, this is extraordinary.”  
“Stop it, John.”  
“Stop what? Sherlock, I’m asking you to talk to me again. Hey, we just solved a case – let’s go get something to eat! Isn’t that what we do?”  
“Not anymore,” Sherlock said as he turned his gaze away from his friend and stared into the empty darkness all around them. “Not for a long time.”  
“Yes, well, we don’t need to hurry back. Mrs. Hudson has the baby and we were planning on staying out here for a while anyway. Just because we’ve finished doesn’t mean we need to move on to the next one right away. We can just--”  
“You don’t understand!” Sherlock declared, the breath of his words a stark contrast to the chilled, black air around them.  
“What?”  
“It’s not about that. It’s not about the work.”  
“Everything is about the work. You’ve always said that.”  
“It can’t be anymore. It can’t be. Now things are different. Priorities have changed and the work has been replaced by something else. Something I have always done my utmost to avoid.”  
“What’s that?”  
“A repulsive thought,” he answered quietly. “A thought I refuse to allow in the chambers of my mind.”  
“But you’re mentioning it now.”  
“Because even as much as I hate the thought of what I have become, it overwhelms me. I couldn’t avoid it if I tried.”  
“Well tell me. Tell me what is so repulsive about your life.”  
Sherlock turned so that he could face John. “You wouldn’t understand. You live for sentiment.”  
“I would understand. You know I understand you. I’m the only one who does.”  
He hesitated, searching whether he should say. That usual earnest look in John’s eyes was silently begging to know, and Sherlock wished he hadn’t turned his gaze that way. “This… domesticity,” he muttered. “I find it appalling.” As soon as he said the words, he walked toward their car, leaving John behind for a moment before he caught up.  
“So you’re pissed off about life because it’s so domestic?”  
“I am not pissed off,” Sherlock told him. “I just expected things to go very differently when I came back.”  
“Join the club.”  
“But you had your life, John. I got used to it. I was happy for you. You had marriage and the baby and yes, there were secrets and lies and mysteries, but you were happy. And I lived with that. But then the complications came, and you… you were alone. And I was alone.”  
“You were alone? You? Sherlock, you had Victoria. I was alone, and I was alone by choice. I could have had everything you have with Victoria, and I fucked it all up!”  
“You reacted like a human, with compassion and with love and with feeling, and those are sentiments, John! Sentiments I am incapable of feeling!”  
“You’re not incapable,” John told him. “You’re just stubborn.”  
“You have said it a thousand times, and I have said it myself. I am not human.”  
“You know that’s not true.”  
“And I suppose you’ve changed your mind as well?”  
“I always knew what you were. Even when I thought you were a sociopath, I knew you made exceptions.”  
Sherlock looked curiously at John as he leaned against the car. “Exceptions?”  
John nodded. “You are not a sociopath. You do have feelings. You are human – as human as it gets. Yes you are ridiculous and odd and eccentric, but you are so much more.”  
Sherlock closed his eyes.  
“Why are you talking like this?” John asked after a moment. “Where did all this come from?”  
Sherlock sighed. “Lestrade. He said… he acted as if the idea of my having children – or at the very least, claiming Victoria as mine – was some sort of joke.”  
As John started to realize, he breathed in deeply. He hadn’t known Sherlock was hurt by that remark, and he knew Greg never meant it that way. “It’s just that he doesn’t know our situation. He doesn’t know all that you do to raise her as yours.”  
“No, it’s not that. It’s the idea of me in a relationship. As a father. As a caretaker. And I can’t blame him for thinking that way.”  
“Since when do you care what people think?”  
Sherlock’s eyes opened and he looked at John, his eyes obviously reddened. “I don’t care what people think. I care what you think.”  
“I don’t think like that, though. I know you. I know you are capable of feelings. Even sentiment, as much as you may hate that.”  
“I’m… not. I don’t. He’s right. They’re all right.”  
“You forget, Sherlock. You kissed me.”  
At this, Sherlock froze. His expression did not change. He did not breathe. His eyes did not blink.  
“And you didn’t ever ask about it later, which tells me you cared. You cared that you kissed me, and you cared that I might not have liked it, and you cared that I had felt so lonely that night, and you care about me, and you care about her, and you care in general. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t do the work you do. If the Great Sherlock Holmes didn’t care, there would be no Great Sherlock Holmes.”  
Sherlock only moved to look back at the ground, because looking at John Watson was a pain he couldn’t bear.  
“And for the record, Sherlock,” John told him, stepping in front of him, attempting to regain eye contact. “I care, too. And it hurt that you never asked me about it. You never even asked me how I felt.”  
“What do you expect from me? You expect me to be something I’m not? To be the kind of man who talks about… about feelings and about… caring and about… about love?”  
“It’s only me here, Sherlock. If you want to be that man, even if only briefly, you can be that man now. Here.”  
Sherlock looked up. Yes, he had been crying. John hadn’t been exactly sure, but here it was, the proof before him that he was in the presence of a fellow human.  
“I only want to be the man you would have me be.”  
“The man I would have you be,” John told him, “Is you. Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, ridiculous man, arsehole.” John reached over to open the car door, but his arm was stopped by that large, familiar hand that lay across it.  
Sherlock had never looked at John like this before. Or rather, John had never seen it. There was something comfortable in the silence between them, yet disturbing. Something was off, but something was right. It was impossible to explain but demanded to be felt.  
“May I kiss you again?” Sherlock asked. His voice trembled like a nervous child’s, his lips pouted, and his eyes sincere. More sincere than John had ever known them to be.  
“I think I would enjoy that very much,” John answered.  
Sherlock leaned down to press his lips against John’s, this time having the sensation reciprocated. And for just those few, brief seconds, everything was right in the world of Sherlock and John.  
John broke the kiss and looked around them before he spoke. “Have you ever… done this?”  
“You’ve seen me kiss Janine.”  
“No, I mean… I mean this. A real kiss.”  
“Real?”  
“Real, yeah. You know, with feelings and that sort of thing.”  
“I… don’t know.”  
“So I suppose anything else is out of the question?”  
“Anything else?”  
John looked around again, then opened the back door of the car and stepped inside. “Get in here,” he said.  
Sherlock looked around as John had, yet in his case it was out of slight confusion, unsure of what John had been looking for. He stepped inside after John and closed the door behind him.  
“It’s just very cold, you know,” John said. “Thought we should get inside to finish our conversation.”  
“What conversation? I was kissing you.”  
“We were kissing each other. And we were enjoying it.”  
Sherlock hid a smile, embarrassed to be enjoying this. To be fooling around in the back seat of a car like a schoolboy. “John, this is…” he wanted to explain it, but for all the words in the dictionary of his mind, he couldn’t find the one that described the moment.  
“This is something I have wanted for a long time,” John said for him. “But for one reason or another I assumed I would never get this chance.”  
“You assumed? I was the one convinced you were accustomed to women.”  
“I was accustomed to women, but now I’m accustomed to you.”  
“Have you… been…”  
“You wouldn’t be the first, no,” John answered. “If that’s what you’re asking. Just the first since you’ve known me.”  
Sherlock nodded. “I see.”  
“But let’s not think about the past,” John said. “Because the past doesn’t matter now.”  
“What do we think about then?”  
“We think about us. What happens with us?”  
Sherlock leaned back, his hands digging deep into his coat pockets as he fell into deep thought. “I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, here you go. Not dead. I managed a chapter on Monday as promised. Be proud of me.  
> And please, oh please, tell me what you think.


	9. Gratuitous Chapter of Sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a fun one because you all are amazing, and because your heart might break soon, and I thought this would suffice for a few days as I write something a bit more angsty.

They had spent the better part of the night in that car in silence as they drove back home. John, who was driving, deliberately took side roads and detours and “got lost” a time or three in order to spend more time here. Sherlock, of course, knew exactly what John was doing and decided not to encourage such behavior, no matter how badly he wished to resolve the issue himself.  
When they arrived home in the wee hours of the morning, Sherlock slipped into Mrs. Hudson’s flat to check in on the baby while John continued upstairs. To Sherlock’s delight, Victoria was cuddled in close to the landlady in her bed, her favorite book and blanket in hand, and a recorded lullaby that Sherlock had composed a year before still playing on repeat in the stereo.   
He left as quietly as he entered, and he crept up the stairs slowly until he reached the shared flat. John had gone upstairs it seemed, and Sherlock stumbled into the kitchen to make tea. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night. Far too much on his mind. Far too much.  
He traveled back toward his room to retrieve his dressing gown, and he discovered John exiting the room just as he was about to enter.  
“Sorry,” John said as he almost bumped into him. “I think Mrs. Hudson put my clothes in your room by mistake. I was just--”  
Sherlock interrupted him abruptly, his hands cupping John’s face, his lips pressed against lips, his body closing in further and further until he was backing John into the bedroom. John had at this point wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s neck, held him close, and when the back of his knees hit the bed, he brought Sherlock down on top of him.   
Sherlock seemed to be too eager to kiss him to focus on where his lips were landing. He kissed along John’s jawline, his neck, his lips, his ears, his forehead. His hands were everywhere, either unsure what to do or too scared to do it. He held John’s waist with one hand, the other running through John’s short hair. When he noticed a very obvious, open-mouthed smile on John’s face, he paused.  
“Am I doing it wrong?”  
John opened his eyes and bit his lip as he stared back at Sherlock. “No, it’s not that,” he laughed a bit. “You just… you make these little noises, like the noises you make when you discover a new clue. It’s quite funny, actually.”  
“Shut up,” Sherlock smiled, his mouth continuing to work along John face, burying himself into John’s neck, tongue and teeth against bare skin and the line of his collarbone. He looked up suddenly, pausing a bit. “It has occurred to me that I have little to no experience in this area.”  
“Little to none?” John asked. “What does that mean? Haven’t you done this before?”  
“Not exactly.”  
“Exactly?”  
“Would you like me to get into specifics or would you like to take this opportunity to be the one of us with the superior knowledge? Because I happen to know this is not typical for you, and you may just want to get in your chance to gloat before I leave to conduct independent research.”  
John laughed lightly, gripping Sherlock’s shoulders. “You may research me all you’d like, Sherlock.”  
“Oh, John. I do hope your bedroom talk in days to come is better, or that you are able to compensate in other ways.”  
“Oh, I compensate,” he growled, turning Sherlock to his back. “Let me show you just how I compensate, hm?”  
Sherlock watched John carefully as he opened slowly the buttons of Sherlock’s shirt, laying a soft kiss to his exposed chest after each one was opened. He looked up occasionally at Sherlock’s curious, smiling face, and continued down until he’d unbuttoned him completely. He rose over Sherlock’s grateful body once more, kissing his lips, so much softer than he had expected, though this was the first time he’d taken time to note how they felt. While his lips were engaged on Sherlock’s, his hands traveled down to his trouser button, then his zip, then reached inside to grip his cock. Clearly Sherlock was ready and willing, but it was still a bit of a surprise to feel Sherlock reacting like this. Surprising, but not uncomfortable.  
No. John knew this was right. Nothing had ever felt more right.  
John moved back down the detective’s body and rested his focus on Sherlock’s erection, his hand working the shaft as Sherlock watched further, though his eyes closed when John began to lick the base. The taller man gripped the sheets, another low moan escaped his lips as he savored this feeling, and John took his time to allow him to feel everything, every kiss, every touch, every ripple of vibrations as he hummed with Sherlock in his mouth. His hands ran up Sherlock’s chest, fingers tracing the lines of his muscles, teasing his nipples.   
Sherlock for once found himself incapable of noting what John was doing exactly. He just knew it felt good – so very good – and that every time John’s mouth swallowed him even deeper, Sherlock felt himself closer and closer to climax. He’d felt this sort of thing before, of course, but it was never like this. It was never like… this.  
“John,” he managed to mutter as John touched him, massaging his balls as he took Sherlock into his throat. “Oh, John. I’m…” He looked down, and John looked up, and as they looked each other in the eye, Sherlock knew he could trust John. He lay back completely and fell into total release.  
As John felt the warmth in the back of his throat, he swallowed it gratefully before climbing back up his body and kissing his neck, resting his nose just under Sherlock’s chin. His breathing was heavy as he tried to make up for what air he had deprived himself for Sherlock’s sake.  
“See?” he whispered, panting as he felt Sherlock’s heart beating faster. “Compensation.”  
Sherlock smiled. “Right. My turn.”  
“Your turn? You just had your turn!”  
“No, I mean it’s my turn on you.” He kissed John and mocked his movements to the best of his recollection, and once he got his lips on the tip, John came, unable to hold out any longer, as he had been struggling to contain himself since that cold and lonely street some hours before.  
“Well,” Sherlock cleared his throat, looking up. “I suppose I shall have to prove myself another time.”  
“Oh, god,” John pouted. “I promise you it’ll be better next time. I just… couldn’t.”  
Sherlock crawled beside him and rested with him another moment. “Did you really come in here for clothes?”  
John laughed. “Yeah, I did!” He insisted. “You thought I knew this would happen?”  
“Oh, I don’t know. You might have taken your chances.”  
John tossed his clothes aside and pulled the blanket up around him. “You don’t mind if I sleep here tonight, do you?”  
Sherlock leaned close to him and lay his head on his pillow. “Stay as long as you’d like tonight,” he smiled. And within moments, he was asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bam.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock deal with "Day-after Syndrome."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god, I'm so sorry. This took far longer than I planned. Also, it's painfully short. I promise that better stuff is coming.

The morning was slightly more uncomfortable than either of them might have anticipated. Waking up beside each other was not the worst bit either of them faced, but functioning the day to follow proved nearly impossible.  
John opened his eyes that morning and slowly turned his head to look beside him. Sherlock was already awake, and he was already looking back at him.  
“Jesus!” John startled. “Did you even sleep?”  
“Course I slept,” he answered. “I was merely trying to wake you.”  
“Did you actually even say anything?”  
“I did not.”  
John sighed, and then smiled a bit. “So… waking up in the same bed. This is… new.”  
Sherlock nodded. “Yes it is.” He stood without any further notice, and walked naked to the bathroom, leaving a slightly confused, also naked, John in bed.  
John rose and retrieved Sherlock’s dressing gown from the back of the door, wrapping it around himself as he gathered his clothes from the previous evening and tossed them into the hamper. He walked out of the room, but only a few inches before Sherlock stepped out and called to him. “Have a shower?”  
How could he refuse?  
“Get in that shower,” John growled. He stripped back the dressing gown and reached for the faucet, and within moments warm water was streaming down over Sherlock’s body, and John stepped in to join him. “Good morning,” he smiled.  
“Morning,” Sherlock responded. He reached up his hands to meet John’s cheeks and held him there, his thumbs gently stroking the doctor’s cheeks.  
John would have kissed him, but this was much more precious. John stepped closer and wrapped his arms around Sherlock, holding him close as the detective continued to caress his face. There was so much he wanted to say, but words fell short of his feelings. How could he explain that this was all he ever wanted, even while he was with Mary?  
“Can it be like this always?” Sherlock asked suddenly.  
John wasn’t sure what to say. “Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”  
At last, Sherlock felt like this was right, like this was fine. It was all fine as John had once said. He never could have imagined a life like this. Not with John, especially. Yet here he stood with him. Here he was – loving and being loved.  
Only a moment later, they could hear familiar footsteps outside their door, and Sherlock and John looked at each other in something teetering between horror and shock.   
“Mrs. Hudson,” John whispered.  
Sherlock nodded. “Just be quiet and she won’t say a word. She’s just bringing the tea.”  
“She’s probably got the baby with her. She’ll be going up to my room in a minute and she’ll see that I’m not there.”  
“Wait,” Sherlock whispered. As soon as they heard, as John predicted, the steps ascending the stairs, Sherlock wrapped a towel around himself and headed out, only looking back to tell John to stay inside until further notice.  
He raced into his room and slipped into the coziest thing he could find, finally draping himself with his dressing gown and walking out for the tea.   
“Oh, hello darling,” Mrs. Hudson smiled. “I’ve just gone up to John’s room, but he isn’t there.”  
“Having a shower,” Sherlock answered as casually as he could. “I’ll take that.”  
The landlady smiled as she handed over Victoria to Sherlock’s waiting arms. “You’re hair’s wet, too,” she noticed. “Were you just…”  
“I was in there just before he got in there, yes. Have you any other questions?”  
“No need to get snippy,” She sighed. “She was an absolute angel last night. I hope you boys took care of everything.”  
“We did. Thank you.” He playfully bounced his daughter on his hip, bringing her into the kitchen. “Has she had breakfast?”  
“Eggs and bread with jam,” she answered. “So tell me everything.” She sat in John’s chair and poured Sherlock’s tea, obviously waiting for him to sit down.  
“Everything?”  
“About last night.”  
“Last night?”  
“You know. You and John.”  
“Mrs. Hudson, I don’t know what you’ve heard or what you think you’ve heard but whatever it is, I assure you that not only is it nothing to fuss about, but it is certainly not any of your business, nor anyone else’s. Furthermore, if you insist on coming in here uninvited and demanding to know details about any number of vague topics from a night’s events, the least you can do--”  
“I only wondered if you’d helped Greg solve that case, that’s all.” She straightened out her apron and stood. “If you didn’t want to tell me, or if it’s some sort of government secret, I can certainly understand. All you have to do is tell me. No need for any of that… stuff you’re doing.”  
Sherlock furrowed his brow once he realized he had misspoken. “Apologies. I just thought… well, no matter.”  
Once Sherlock was satisfied that Mrs. Hudson had left completely, he put Victoria down with her toys and raced back to John. He peeked his head in briefly. “All clear now.”   
John exited and dressed and joined Sherlock in the living room after some time. He sat in his chair, sipping his tea and watching Sherlock interacting with Victoria. It was so natural. So perfect. Everything John could have ever imagined and more.  
“So… are we… ever going to tell people?”  
Sherlock paused and looked up at him. “Of course we are.”  
“Right.” He leaned back and took a sip of his tea. “When?”  
“When it’s right,” he answered. “We’ll know when it’s right, won’t we?”  
“It’s going to come with some inevitable questions, I would imagine.”  
“Yes. Of course.”  
“And… how do we handle that?”  
Sherlock silently lifted Victoria into his lap as they sat on the floor amidst the overabundance of toys the toddler owned. “My dear Watson, it seems your papa is a little bit scared of the future. What do you think about that?”  
She looked up at her father and grinned, offering him a toy. “Play, Papa?”  
John’s face initially filled with shock, but he then smiled in amazement and held out his hand to receive the toy. “You called me Papa!”  
“She’s been calling you Papa for a long time,” Sherlock said. “It was a bit difficult finding the right title, but she rejected the other ideas.”  
“Other ideas?”  
“We toyed with ‘Old Man,’ ‘Father,’ and ‘That Guy Who Lives Upstairs,'” he said. “But she picked Papa.”  
John knelt on the floor beside Sherlock, who was still holding their daughter in his lap. “Papa would love to play with you, Tori,” he said. “What are we playing today, hm? Is it dragons?”  
She nodded and handed him yet another toy dragon.   
“You’re the knight, then? You get to slay the dragons?”  
Sherlock watched as they played, and he pointed out the gross inaccuracies of the dragon’s wing-to-length ratio, and John leaned his head onto Sherlock’s shoulder.  
…  
That evening, John sang his daughter to sleep and joined Sherlock in the bedroom afterward. He smiled contentedly as he walked toward him and sat with him on the bed.   
“Listen. All those things we discussed earlier about when we would tell people and what we would say, I think I only felt so scared about all that because I had this incredible thought that somehow I could lose you because you never intended to tell anyone.”  
“ _You_ were scared?” He asked. It seemed to John from the tone in Sherlock’s voice that perhaps he was surprised. “I was scared. I still am, if I’m being honest.”  
“Why?”  
“Because I know what I am. You’ve said it yourself. You have loved me at my worst, and I know you will love me still, but it does not diminish what I am.”  
“And… what are you?”  
“I’m a machine. I am incapable of fulfilling your emotional needs.”  
John stretched his hand out to touch Sherlock’s. “You don’t need to fulfill my emotional needs,” he said. “You _are_ my emotional need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had planned originally to make this a 20-chapter fic, but due to chapters I have combined and redundant ideas I have cut out, I think it will be more like 12-15. Hope that's okay.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This has all just turned to fluff, hasn't it?

“I know this is difficult, but it will be alright. I promise.”  
“It’s not that it’s hard, John. It’s just… I’m…”  
“You’re what, Sherlock?”  
He moved his face away, trying to conceal his feelings. “I’m scared, John.”  
John reached a hand to Sherlock’s knee and caressed it softly. “Don’t be, darling. There’s nothing to be scared of.”  
He nodded and placed his hand on top of John’s. “I’m so thankful for you.” He took a deep breath in and exhaled quickly, turning to glance at the back seat. “Victoria, are you ready, dear?”  
“Ready, Daddy!”  
Victoria, who had just turned 4 a few weeks before, was now starting her first day of school. She was a bit younger than required, but she had an exceptional mind, and it had been recommended that she enroll early.  
John stepped out of the passenger’s seat and stepped around to unbuckle her. “I love you, sweetheart,” he smiled as he pressed a kiss to her cheek.  
“I love you too, Papa,” she grinned, and to Sherlock it seemed she looked more and more like John these days.  
Sherlock stepped out of the driver’s seat as she began walking into the building, and he stopped her, grabbing her swiftly off of her feet and holding her in a firm embrace. “You behave yourself, just as we said,” he told her. “And you stand up to the bullies. And you be nice to your teachers, and you learn everything you can, alright?”  
“Yes, Daddy,” she answered. “You told me that already.”  
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said. “But it’s very important.”  
“I won’t forget, Daddy. Promise.”  
He kissed her cheek. “I love you.”  
She looked him firmly in the eyes and sighed. “I told you I loved you when you said it before. And I still love you, too.”  
As she skipped into the building, John stood next to Sherlock. “She’ll be fine, you know.”  
“She sighs like you,” he told John. “And I know. I pity the young boy or girl who teases her.”  
“Why would anyone tease her?” John asked. “Come on, let’s get home. I’m sure you’ve got a good case waiting in your emails to get your mind off of this.”  
“Yes,” he muttered as he entered the car. “Actually, no. No, I don’t think that I should take a case today. I would be far too distracted.”  
“Distracted? Sherlock, you are the most practical human being in the world. What are the odds that something will happen today that would require you to take the day off?”  
“Given the amounts of accidents, abductions, and abandonments--”  
“No,” John interrupted firmly. “Never mind. Fine. We’ll take the day off. But then you’re right back at it tomorrow, understood?”  
Sherlock nodded, and they began the drive back home. He stared blankly out the window almost the entire way, and John was determined to keep his mind in a more centered place.  
“Darling, how long have we been together?”  
Sherlock flinched as John broke the silence. “Hm? What?”  
“How long have you and I been together?”  
“11 months, 3 weeks, and 6 days.”  
“And next week – Tuesday, in fact – is a sort of a special day. Any idea?”  
“I assume you are referring to our anniversary,” he answered coldly.  
“Well don’t be too excited,” John scoffed. “You know, you could show a bit of enthusiasm.”  
“Is it a milestone, John? Because we’ve known each other much longer than that. Just because it marks one year since our physical relationship began, does that mean it makes us partners for only a year?”  
“Well, you know, _this_ kind of partners, yeah.”  
Sherlock shrugged. “I suppose you have plans?”  
“I thought we could go to Angelo’s. You know, since it was the first place we had dinner together.”  
“You had dinner. I observed.”  
“Oh darling, there you go getting all sentimental again. You’re making me blush.”  
Sherlock stared suddenly at him, silent for a moment. John noticed his eyes searching, eyebrows furrowed. “Sarcasm?” He asked finally.  
“Sarcasm,” John answered.  
…  
“Stop checking your phone!”  
“I’m only being sure. One can never be too careful.”  
“She’s still got another hour before school’s out. And what have we been doing all day? Lounging around, twiddling our thumbs, staring at the walls.”  
“I can’t help it! Considering things that happen to either of us when we’re not in each other’s sights, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine something could happen to our daughter.”  
“Nothing will happen to her. No one is after us. Calm down.”  
“I am calm!” Sherlock snapped. “ _You_ calm down!”  
John suppressed a smile and continued reading his paper. He had had quite a bit of time that day to think of him and Sherlock, and he found he had questions. Not just pass-the-time questions, but real questions. Questions about them. Questions about their future. Questions about… everything.  
“Sherlock, may I ask you something?”  
“Ridiculous question, John. You know I can’t stop you from asking or speaking or doing anything at all.”  
He shook his head and moved to sit beside Sherlock on the couch. He reached his hand out for Sherlock’s, gripping it tightly and obtaining Sherlock’s full attention. “Well, I’m not exactly sure how to ask, but I want to know… well… I mean, when Mary and I got engaged, you helped out quite a bit, but you said all that about marriage and how you didn’t believe in it, and I know how you are about sentiment and that sort of thing.”  
“Get to the point, John.”  
“Yes, well… um…”  
“You’re asking if I would ever consider marrying you?”  
John looked into Sherlock’s eyes with a bit of surprise. “Well, um, yes. Yes, I am.”  
Sherlock checked his phone again, an action which elicited a sigh of frustration from John. “I think the idea of marriage is completely useless. Nothing changes, does it? Take us, for instance. We already live together and love each other and have a child we are raising together. What will change when we get married?”  
“I suppose nothing, really. But a wedding would be a wonderful way for us to declare our love to everyone, don’t you think?”  
“Everyone knows,” Sherlock insisted. “Why should we patronize them by doing what they all do?”  
“Because we’re not patronizing them. We’re declaring our love.”  
“Pfft.”  
“Solid argument,” John nodded. “Care to elaborate?”  
“51% of marriages end in divorce. Name one couple that we know who has been married for, say, ten years or more. You can’t do it! Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson… and even Anderson divorced last year.”  
“What about your parents?”  
“Oh, that’s only because they’re the only two people who ever could be with the other. They aren’t just a married couple, they’re… Crazy Is and Crazy Does.”  
John laughed a little. “So that’s a no from you, then? You wouldn’t marry me?”  
“If you really wanted to, I suppose I would.”  
John nodded and stood, retrieving the keys calmly. He’d hoped for another answer. He’d hoped Sherlock would be all excitement and eagerness when it came to the subject. After all, John was the love of his life – Sherlock had told him so many times.  
“Where are you going?”  
“To get Tori,” John answered.  
“I’m coming.”  
“No you’re not.” John wasn’t angry. He was just… sad, he supposed. Or else he wasn’t exactly sure what he was. “I want to be alone for a few minutes, alright? Why don’t you… I don’t know… clean up?”  
“Clean?”  
John left on that note, silent and determined not to think about it too much.  
He arrived thirty minutes before school was dismissed, but he stood outside of his car waiting anyway. As soon as the kids started coming out, he searched for the girl with the big blue eyes and blonde curly hair and high-set nose he hoped wouldn’t develop like his had. Once he saw her, he beamed with pride and joy.  
He didn’t need marriage. He already had his family.  
…  
“Stay out as long as you’d like, dears,” Mrs. Hudson winked. “I’ll keep an eye on the little one.”  
“Thank you,” John smiled. “We shouldn't be out late. We’re only having dinner.”  
“I’ll just keep her with me so you needn’t mind when you return.”  
They kissed their daughter goodbye and stepped outside. They would have taken the car, but Sherlock smiled once the breeze had hit them and he gripped John’s hand tightly, stepping closer to him. “Let’s walk,” he suggested. “It’s a beautiful night.”  
“Yeah, alright,” John answered. He gripped Sherlock’s hand, pulling him closer as they walked. “It is a beautiful night. Look at those stars.”  
Sherlock glanced up briefly. “Like our first night together,” he mumbled.  
“You remember?”  
“Course I remember.”  
John smiled. “Hey, detour?”  
“Detour?”  
“Just come,” John winked. He pulled Sherlock into an alley just a block or so from their flat, and pressed Sherlock against the bricks. “I know how you despise public displays of affection, and I really want to kiss you.”  
Sherlock’s hands traveled to John’s face, pulling him closer and setting his smiling lips against his. The kiss was deep and powerful and fervent, and far too short, John determined.  
“We really should get to the restaurant,” Sherlock said as he broke away. “Or else we may get arrested for public indecency.”  
“So what?” John laughed. “Kiss me some more.”  
He obliged happily, but only for a moment. “Snogging is one thing. What it will inevitably lead to is quite another. We do have the whole night left, you know.”  
John nodded and allowed Sherlock to lead him through the alleyway, and onto the street where Angelo’s stood just a few blocks down. “If you think I won’t make up for it tonight, you’re wrong.”  
“Oh, I’ve no doubt.”  
Within minutes, they had arrived at the restaurant at their usual table by the window. As they enjoyed their meals, John couldn’t help but stare perhaps a bit too long and too often at the man across from him. He wondered how and why and when Sherlock had decided to become his. But questioning those things out loud would be far too dangerous. Suppose Sherlock should realize he was too good for John?  
Yet at the same time, Sherlock sat in awe of the man in front of _him_. John was his hero. John had saved his life. John had given him meaning and worth and purpose. John was so clever and beautiful and good. The best man he’d ever known.  
Altogether, few words were spoken over dinner. They reminisced a bit here and there, and Sherlock commented on the fact that John even wore that same jumper he’d worn when they’d first come here together. But it was a mostly silent exchange of looks and thoughts as Sherlock looked forward to things to come, and John thought back on all that his lover had brought him from.  
“Will you stop checking your phone?” John asked as soon as they began the walk home. “Tori’s just fine, I promise.”  
“One can’t be too sure,” he replied. “You know how Mrs. Hudson is.”  
John turned his collar against the wind. “It’s gotten chilly, hasn’t it? Let’s get a cab.”  
“No!” Sherlock insisted, and forcefully at that.  
“Why not?”  
“Because,” he answered, checking his phone for the fifteenth time that evening. “I want to walk with you.”  
John shook his head. “I don’t really understand you,” he smiled. “But somehow I always do what you want. You must teach me your trick.”  
“Oh it’s no trick, John. What have I always said about sentiment?”  
“Yes, yes, I know…” John sighed. He held Sherlock’s hand tightly, still bundled against the wind as they made their way painfully home.  
“John,” Sherlock said, clearing his throat a bit. “I want to tell you something. I want to say thank you for all you’ve done for me. And for everything you’ve meant.”  
John shrugged. “It was nothing,” he laughed. “And to you, Sherlock, I would like to say… why the hell aren’t we in a cab snogging?”  
“Because we’re only a few blocks from home. It’s a waste, don’t you think?”  
John buried himself into Sherlock’s side. “Put your arm around me and keep me warm like a proper boyfriend.”  
Sherlock threw one arm around John while the other moved to his side, pulling his phone from his pocket.  
“I swear, Sherlock, if you check that thing one more time, I’m going to kill you. This is our night, Tori’s fine, and I’m freezing!”  
“You’re right,” he said, putting the phone away. “We should get a cab.”  
As Sherlock moved to the curb, John watched in confusion until a cab pulled up for them. “Well that didn’t take much convincing, did it?” John asked.  
“Even I can’t argue that this weather is a bit harsh.” He looked to the cabbie. “221B Baker Street.”  
John gripped Sherlock’s coat collar and pulled him close, giving him that kiss he had promised before. And it was only another couple of minutes before they found themselves at home, standing outside the building at Baker Street, and Sherlock handed the cabbie his fare before they stepped inside.  
“What did I tell you about that phone, Sherlock?”  
“You won’t be sorry you’ve been letting me check it,” he smiled cheekily as they opened the door.  
John noticed the hall lights were dimmed, which was rare for this early in the evening. He glanced back at Sherlock, who seemed not in the least surprised, and he continued up the steps without saying a word.  
Sherlock followed behind, doing his utmost to suppress the look of excitement on his face as John reached the top step in front of him.  
“This… is a lot of candles,” John said quietly. “You had Mrs. Hudson do this?”  
“Happy anniversary, John.”  
“But you hate anniversaries. And celebrations. And… romance.”  
“But you love all that stuff, and I love you.”  
John walked to Sherlock and tossed his arms around his neck. “You, my love, are about to get one hell of a thank you.” He pressed his lips against Sherlock’s, not even bothering to remove their coats before he backed them down the hall toward their bedroom.  
“Wait,” Sherlock said, breaking away. “I got you something.”  
“A present? We’re doing presents? You should have told me.”  
“No, no, it’s fine. Here. For you.” He handed John a small wrapped box with a too-large bow on top.  
“You wrapped this?”  
“Molly did. I… kept messing up. I’m afraid my fingers kept… getting in the way.”  
He chuckled a little. “Well, thank you,” he smiled, removing the wrapping as carefully as he could. “I’m surprised Molly never let the cat out of the bag when I saw her yesterday. Usually she tells--”  
John stopped cold. He stared at what was under the wrapping. Unmistakably, this was a ring box.  
“Open it,” Sherlock urged, a simple smile shadowed on his lips.  
“Sherlock…”  
“Oh, come on. Or should I do it for you?”  
“Sherlock…”  
He stepped beside John and opened the box to reveal a simple gold band. “It’s old, yes, but it belonged to my grandfather. On my mother’s side, that is. My mother apparently kept it in the hope that one of her sons might grow to have something of a functional relationship. It’s meant for me to wear, of course, but it’s a bit small. It suits you better, anyway.”  
“Sherlock… what… what does this mean?”  
“Oh, I thought I’d made it obvious.”  
“It’s not obvious to me.”  
“Well it means I’m asking you to marry me, of course.”  
John sat in his chair, still clad in his coat, still holding the box. “I thought… you… didn’t want to get married.”  
“What? Oh right. Yes. Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? But I’ll have you know I was only creating a diversion from my original intentions. When you started talking about marriage and weddings, I had to get all of that out of the way. You know, so you would never expect this.”  
John stared down at the box again. Or at the ring. Or… at nothing in particular as the shock still pulsed through his body.  
“So is that a no, then?”  
“Hm? Oh, uh… no. I mean, yes! I mean, no to it being a no because my answer is yes!” He stood slowly and smiled up at Sherlock, who could see the tears in his eyes. “But… you’re really sure?”  
Sherlock reached his hands to John’s chest, opening his coat and removing it. He placed it on the chair behind him, then smiled back at John. “I’ve never wanted anything more.”  
“I… I was going to get you a ring, you know. I was going to be the one to do this.”  
“I’m not sure I want a ring,” he said.  
“I thought you wanted to marry me?”  
“I work with my hands, John. A ring would be troublesome.”  
John thought for a moment, then looked back at Sherlock. “Wait here.” He ran up to his old bedroom, and Sherlock stood awkwardly down in the living room until he returned.  
“Here,” John smiled. “You’ll wear these. I don’t wear them anyway.” He reached the chain over Sherlock’s head, placing it around his neck.  
“Your dog tags?”  
“Yeah. Yeah… that can’t be troublesome, can it?”  
He stared down at them, taking them in his hand and rubbing them gently as he looked down at them. “John, this… this is more than I could ever ask for.”  
“Now you have me with you always.”  
Sherlock fell into John, burrowing his face into John’s neck. “Come on,” he whispered as he took John’s hand. “I want to make love to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sadly, this is the second to last chapter. It just felt right to end it where I plan to end it. The last chapter, however, should deliver. I have a LOT planned for it. Complications included. Bear with me. It may take a week or two to write.
> 
> Also, thank you to everyone who's kept up with this, loyally reading this, leaving sweet comments, and talking to me on Tumblr. You guys are the best.


	12. Conclusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry it took so long to update. I just hope you like it!

They had decided on a simple ceremony. John and Sherlock would be married in a small ceremony surrounded only by Greg, Mrs. Hudson, Victoria, the Holmes’, and their officiator. They would honeymoon in Greece and return in time for the Christmas festivities. Upon return, they would prepare for Victoria’s next year of primary school. Time flew, but not quickly enough for John.  
John had been the one to insist they marry in private. Sherlock wanted to plan it all to be sure it was greater and grander than John’s wedding to Mary, but John reminded him that none of that mattered. Mary was before. Sherlock was now. This family was forever, and no amount of tulle or rice could make them any less so.  
…  
 _Wednesday_ –  
“Three days.”  
Sherlock continued composing his email.  
“There’s nothing left to do now but wait,” John continued.  
Sherlock kept typing.  
“Are you ready? You know we haven’t spoken about it in nearly a week now. Most engaged couples can’t stop talking about it by this point.”  
“We’re not most engaged couples.”  
John smiled. They certainly were not.  
“Mrs. Hudson says she’ll call us every day and leave a message. I told her I don’t expect us to be accepting calls.”  
Sherlock fell silent again, and John left the room. He knew he’d gotten as much out of it as he ever would.  
…  
 _Thursday_ –  
They’d been at this case all morning. A man had been shot in a room that had been locked and was windowless. The hidden-door theory seemed obvious, but none was found. John watched Sherlock – the man who loved a locked-door mystery – search frantically through the room and his thoughts. These sorts of cases had a way of stumping him. He usually loved the challenge. Today, he just seemed pissed off.  
“You alright?”  
Sherlock shook his head but answered yes. John didn’t want to argue, but he couldn’t help it.  
“You’re not thinking ahead are you?” John asked quietly. “Because if it’s all too distracting, we don’t need to do this.”  
“I’m fine!” Sherlock snapped back. Even Donovan seemed concerned.  
Sherlock couldn’t figure it out. He gave up.  
He never gave up.  
…  
 _Friday_ –  
Sherlock walked in from his afternoon at the lab and gripped John by his lapels, pulling him up from the chair. John couldn’t react in time to realize Sherlock’s lips were on his, kissing him deeply, more passionately than he could recall ever having been kissed.  
“Sherlock,” John breathed as he broke from the kiss just long enough to speak. “What are you doing?”  
“Where is she?”  
“Mrs. Hudson took her to the park.”  
“While ago?”  
“About twenty minutes ago.”  
“Perfect.” He grabbed him again, peeling back his many layers of tops, complaining that John wore too many of them. Impractical it was for sex, he explained. Ridiculous, really.  
“What’s gotten into you?” John asked once they’d reached the bedroom, Sherlock giving John little choice as to their final destination.  
Sherlock looked into John’s eyes and then his lips, then to his eyes again. “Fuck me.”  
John’s eyes widened in surprise. Sherlock had never spoken to him this way, but John couldn’t complain. He couldn’t exactly articulate either, however. “Y-yeah alright,” he agreed.  
Sherlock pushed John into the mattress and crawled over him, unfastening his belt in a mess of fingers and lust. Then he worked on John’s, and sooner than either of them expected, they were both naked, and John had flipped Sherlock into the mattress.  
“Seriously, though,” John asked quietly as Sherlock kissed his neck. “What’s all this for?” It wasn’t uncommon for Sherlock to become unusually passionate after a near-death experience, but he was almost certain that couldn’t have possibly happened today. Besides, Sherlock had never been _this_ eager.  
Sherlock looked into John’s eyes once more, but this time they looked softer than before. “I want you to fuck me like this is the last time.”  
The words struck John with something akin to fear, but that’s how Sherlock was. He would often say the exact thing to put emotion into John’s actions. And an emotional John was a productive John.  
“Like it’s the last time,” John whispered. And he proceeded to do just that.  
…  
 _Saturday_ –  
John woke before the alarm rang. He woke before Victoria. He woke before the sun came out.  
He woke with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.  
The absence of the man who slept beside him and the cold that accompanied the space in the sheets felt suddenly unsettling, and John jolted up and frantically searched his surroundings. Sherlock wasn’t in the shower or the kitchen or the sitting room. He wasn’t composing or experimenting or sneaking in a cigarette.  
Sherlock was gone.  
With his daughter sleeping just upstairs, John had no choice but to stay – at least for now. He calmed himself by convincing himself that Sherlock was simply gone to work on something. That he only needed a distraction from his nerves. That he would return and shower and dress and kiss John on the lips and Tori on the forehead and Mrs. Hudson on the cheek, and they would set out to his parent’s garden for the wedding. And then they would be married and John wouldn’t have to worry about Sherlock again.  
Mrs. Hudson rushed upstairs around nine, her usually slow steps stumbling and shuffling into the flat. “John!” She called out, and he had been sitting in his chair pretending to read while Tori actually read in Sherlock’s chair.  
John looked over with a curious glare. He knew this was going to be about Sherlock.  
“Dear, could I perhaps… speak with you in private?”  
Tori was oblivious, and John stepped into the kitchen with his landlady so they could speak. But she remained silent, handing him a note of white paper with that distinct, scratchy scroll of his.

Dearest John,

This is not goodbye. This is mercy.  
I have come to the conclusion of late that it is an inevitable and unavoidable fact that you will soon realise that I am far beneath you. I say this not out of humility, but rather out of truth. You in all your wisdom and beauty deserve much better than I, and in time I am confident you will find it.  
I will return to you and Victoria in time. I could never, no matter how worthless I know myself to be at times, deprive that girl her father. And I could never be so cruel as to deprive myself of her. She is the reason I stayed as long as I did.  
I’m sorry.  
When I return, we will talk about this all. Right now, I know your emotional state will get the better of you, and the likelihood of our having a calm conversation about this all now is very low. You know that to be true.  
I love you. I will always love you. And I thank you for the love you’ve shown to me even in my most undeserving times. You are the sun, and I am the moon. You bring your own light, and I only conduct.  
For so long I truly thought it was the other way round. I could not have been more wrong.  
I will see you soon. And again, I am so very sorry for the inconvenience of this all. Yet another example of how much better you could do.  
Love always,  
S  
Mrs. Hudson waited for him to cry. He didn’t.  
“When did you find this?”  
“Just now,” she answered in a shaky voice.  
“I’ll be back.”  
John grabbed his jacket from the back of the door and headed to the first place he imagined Sherlock might be: the morgue.  
He wasn’t there.  
He called the Holmes’, and they told him they hadn’t heard from him in almost a month. They had no reason to lie.  
He called Greg and Molly and Wiggins and anyone who’d ever seen Sherlock, it seemed. No one had an answer for him. None of them had any doubt that he would be just where he was meant to be on his wedding day.  
Perhaps Sherlock had chosen to be sentimental! John searched the park they’d strolled in more times than he could count (he had no doubt Sherlock knew the exact number of times). He broke into pubs and searched them top-to-bottom. He scoured drug dens and crack houses. He thought the worst. He had to. It was Sherlock.  
If he hadn’t run off, they’d have been married an hour by now.  
He collapsed into the dirt hill beside the skaters’ hangout and put his hand into his face and for the first time in too long he cried. “Why?” he shouted as one fist clenched a handful of dirt. “You selfish bastard! How could you do this?” He kicked his feet into the dirt as he’d never done. And just when he thought he’d felt every pain there was to feel in this moment, he felt a sharp prick on his forearm.  
“Damn bee!” He shouted a clear overreaction. “Damn you shit fucking bitch shit cunt fucking bee to hell!”  
Suddenly it seemed even the bees were against him. It was no wonder – there was a hive just beside him in the little tree. He couldn’t blame the bees, really. It wasn’t their fault.  
Sherlock would have defended the bees. That strange man and his obsessions.  
With bees.  
Bees.  
Of course!  
…  
Janine wasn’t home, and why would she be? She was as great a mystery as any villain they had faced, though she herself was not yet proven to be a villain. She had helped the duo more than she even knew, and her cottage with its bees and it’s clean, open air was exactly the place Sherlock would have come.  
He knocked.  
No answer.  
He knocked again.  
No answer.  
He let himself in in spite of the protests from the locks and was not even slightly surprised to see Sherlock seated beside the fire.  
John didn’t say a word. He stepped closer, finally standing in front of Sherlock, who at this point only glanced at the floor with his fingers steepled beneath his chin.  
“What was my mistake?” he asked timidly. “I told no one, I left no trace of my whereabouts, and I paid the cabbie off.”  
“Your mistake,” John answered considerably louder and clearer than Sherlock, “Was that you chose to leave me.”  
“I told you it wasn’t forever.”  
“What difference does that make? You shouldn’t have left at all!”  
“Don’t yell, John. There’s absolutely no reason to yell.”  
“So that’s it, then? You walked away and I’m left with no choice but to accept it?”  
“Precisely.”  
“Well I don’t! I don’t!”  
“You’re not looking at this situation correctly,” Sherlock replied, finally looking into John’s eyes. “You will hate me, and you will feel guilty for leaving me, and you will have no choice but to stay even when you’re miserable because we will have a piece of paper that legally binds us. You will never be happy again.”  
“Shut up.”  
“No. And what kind of life will that be for Victoria? What kind of pain will that inflict on her young life to see her parents facing such pain and stress daily?”  
“She loves you.”  
“I know. Poor thing.”  
“I love you.”  
“Well you’re just an idiot.”  
John paced angrily, clenching his fists at his sides and only resisting the urge to cry because he had too many thoughts of anger in his heart to decide on one particular emotion.  
“I will come back, John. But you need time apart from me. You need to take the time to focus on what you truly want and not on what you’re guilted into wan--”  
“Shut up! Shut the hell up! I am in love with you, Sherlock! I am more sure of this than I am of my own name or my own existence! I am so in love with you that it physically hurts, and you would walk away because you think you’re not good enough for me? Fuck that, and fuck you!”  
“John!”  
“No, let me finish!” He stopped in front of Sherlock again, his toes pointed to his, and he looked him in the eye once more. “I’ve said it before, and you know it to be true. You’re a drama queen! You wouldn’t be Sherlock Holmes if you didn’t make everything so damned dramatic the day of your wedding! And now you’re a… a… bridezilla!”  
Sherlock furrowed his brow. “John…”  
“And I have never wanted anything or anyone more than I want you now. I have loved you since you took my hand and ran, and I will love you until I’m cold in the ground. Now get off your arse, come out this door, get in my car, and come home with me right this minute!”  
Sherlock stood. “Yes sir.”  
“I’m not arguing with you anymore, Sher--” He stopped. “Wait… you’re coming, then?”  
“Yes of course I am. How could I not?”  
“What the hell was all of this, then?”  
“I needed you to know you wanted this,” he said as if it were nothing. “I needed to know _I_ did.”  
John shook his head. “I hate you so much right now.”  
“Make up your mind.”  
“You know the wedding was supposed to be hours ago, don’t you?”  
“It’s nothing we couldn’t arrange to have in another two hours. Our guest list isn’t exactly composed of world leaders or those who accommodate a rigorous schedule.”  
“You are by far the most obnoxious arsehole…”  
“Yes, we’ve been through this.”  
John was far from satisfied with the outcome. “I haven’t forgiven you, you know.”  
“You will.”  
John took his hand and led him to the door. “Oh? And how do you know that?”  
“Because,” Sherlock smiled. “You’re an idiot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in case anyone wants to check it out, I've started a new Johnlock fic entitled "A Much More Vicious Motivator" that centers around a serial killer AU/Dark!Sherlock theme. Check it out if you want!

**Author's Note:**

> OOC? Perhaps. Choppy dialogue? For now. But hopefully you will see the story I am attempting to convey from the heart of this text.  
> As to details of Mary's death, some information is given, and more will be revealed as the plot progresses.  
> Feel free to leave any feedback either here or on my Tumblr page (http://renntastic.tumblr.com/). Thank you for your visit, and I hope you enjoy your stay!


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